The main point that I probably failed to make at said party is that a stereotype is a concept about a particular group of people that has a broader – let’s say, macro-social significance. I’m not going to get into the Heap of Sand paradox, and thus we will leave aside for now the question of how many people, or what sorts of people, must believe something in order for it to be a stereotype. I’ll just give the perhaps unsatisfactory answer that in order for something to be a stereotype it has to be a socially recognizable idea held by a particular social group and applied indiscriminately to another social group. A more jargon-y way of saying what I mean is that stereotypes are a part of a kind of institutional knowledge possessed by a community of practice.

What stereotypes are *not* are judgments or preferences. In the exhibit “The Artist is Present”, patrons must step through a doorway containing a naked man and a naked woman.  Most patrons – male and female – turn towards the woman in order to pass into the exhibit.  Clearly, there is some kind of social phenomenon occurring here – people are making their decision using social information, that is, information about the people they are interacting with.  However, does this information rise to the level of stereotype?  I argue that it does not.  There is no stereotype of women being better to turn toward while passing through some people in close quarters.  Perhaps people find it less uncomfortable to face a naked woman than a naked man, but is this because of a stereotype about men and women, or does the judgment occur below the level of stereotype?

Really, we all know what stereotypes are.  We know negative stereotypes: men are violent, women are bad at math, asians are bad drivers, blacks are lazy, jews are greedy.  We know positive stereotypes: women are nurturing, men are logical, asians are good at math, blacks are good at sports, jews are wealthy.  For some, these stereotypes may seem unfamiliar, or outdated, or just plain wrong, but no one can deny their cultural significance, at least in America (stereotypes of course vary across cultures).

So when I am faced with a question such as “how do you decide who to sit near on a train,” I cannot help but feel that the argument is, on some level, disingenuous.  Of course, everyone makes decisions – conscious or not – about who to group near in public spaces.  Of course, some of these decisions are based on the kinds of unflattering grouping methods that we are all socially conditioned with – and it would be interesting to do a study on grouping on subways, for instance, to see if white people preferentially group with white people, etc.  Of course everyone evaluates threats, and some people do so on race and gender lines.  But, to take an example that was brought up at this party, if a woman evaluates men as potential threats because they are more likely to rape her than other women are, is this based on stereotype?  The answer is, of course not.

The reason, quite simply, is that “rapist” is not a stereotype about men – except, perhaps, in certain ultra-radical corners of the internet.  For most people in society, if asked to come up with five, ten, or even a hundred words to describe the stereotypical male, “rapist” would not be one of them.  Stereotypes, as a macro-cultural phenomenon, tend to be aligned more with the dominant power structures in society.  Thus stereotypes about men that men think of as hilarious – such as obsession with power tools, inability to ask for directions, etc – are allowed to continue whereas facts or statistics about men that men consider troubling are never really allowed to become stereotypes.  Thus, while the stereotypical criminal is male, the stereotypical male is not a criminal (at least not the stereotypical white male).

So when a woman sees a man and uses her judgment to say “this man has the potential to assault me in one of several traumatizing ways” this is not engaging in stereotyping.  When a woman sees a man and says “this man probably likes trucks and leaving the toilet seat up,” that is engaging in stereotyping.  The first is a survival skill; the second is a way of maintaining and strengthening the oppressive gender divisions within our society.

Now back to the issue of grouping.  I would argue that grouping is based on a paradigm of “us” and “them,” or “Self” and “Other,” that exists prior to, and in fact underlies and enables, the kind of social knowledge that makes up a stereotype.  If a stereotype consists of the identification of a socially recognizable group and the application of social knowledge to that group, then every stereotype presupposes the identification of a socially recognizable group – and I argue that for grouping to take place – in other words, for someone to decide to sit next to one person on the subway rather than another – mere social recognition of “sameness” or “difference” is sufficient without the application of any additional social facts.

In other words, not all socially salient knowledge is stereotype.

Well, here’s the thing. Racism is not inborn. No, no, no. Racism, in fact, *can’t* be inborn, because biologically there is no such thing as “race.” In order to be racist, therefore, people have to – HAVE TO – be TRAINED to recognize a thing called “race,” TAUGHT to understand what its characteristics are, and SHOWN how to interact socially with people from other “races.” Race is a SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION.

Now, certain patterns of behavior may be inborn and the concept of “race” may be deployed in society to access certain inborn patterns of behavior in different circumstances. You can be taught, for instance, to access the “member of my group/herd” pattern around “white” people and the “member of a rival group/herd” pattern around “black” people – that is, once you’ve learned what a “white” person is and what a “black” person is, definitions which vary widely from place to place and time to time. Most people today probably don’t know what an “octoroon” is but it used to be quite important in this country (hint: Homer Plessy was one, and, in order to get arrested for riding in a whites-only car, had to *tell* the train conductor about his lineage, because that was how white he looked.

So, now that we’ve established that there is biologically no such thing as race and that racism, therefore, is inherently ridiculous, let’s talk about how and why everyone actually is racist.

Let’s consider the average white person who does not consider himself racist, and imagine him walking through a black neighborhood. Imagine that for a moment, now, answer: is he nervous? Is it okay for him to be nervous? Is it racist for him to be nervous?

Now let’s back up a little bit, because there are several problems with the question that I just asked. First, I wrote about the “average white person” using the grammatical male gender, and I imagine that you imagined a male as the “average white person,” although if you didn’t good for you. That’s a problem with language and gender, that I’m sure many of you were already aware of, but I bring it up because it foreshadows what I’m about to say about race.

When I asked you to imagine a “black neighborhood,” what did you imagine? Was there a specific, predominantly black neighborhood that you know of that you imagined? Did you just imagine a generic ghetto? Perhaps a scene from “The Wire” or some other mass-media entertainment program? Did you imagine a black neighborhood that you have walked through and felt nervous in? What are the qualities and characteristics of the black neighborhood that you imagined?

So just think about that for a minute, in a non-defensive manner. Yes, it was a trick question, and yes, by making the white guy nervous I activated some cultural connotations that I knew carried images of “the ghetto.” Yes, just because some black neighborhoods have high crime rates doesn’t mean that your simply knowing that fact makes you racist. Statistically, black people in this country are poorer, less powerful, and more likely to commit violent crimes than white people, and using a simple statistical fact – one that every white person seems to know – as data to populate your imaginary black neighborhood doesn’t make you racist. Right? Well, actually, it does. Separating people into groups based on skin color – a biologically irrelevant trait – and then making generalizations about those people (or where they live) is, by definition, racist. I know it’s widespread, it’s in our culture, it’s impossible to get away from — but that is EXACTLY why we have to acknowledge it. We have to be aware that our default ways of thinking about certain culturally delineated groups are based on historical accidents and methodological fallacies in order to be able to even begin to resist the constant and continuing indoctrination of our racist society.

So is racism acceptable? Yes and no. It is acceptable in that we HAVE TO accept the fact of our racism in order to defeat it, because racism is tricky, as my little ploy hopefully illustrated. On the other hand, we shouldn’t just accept it without trying to change it because it holds us back as individuals and as a society to rely on irrational and baseless tropes to provide us with context for our decision-making.

And look – we’re making progress. Anyone who’s studied the civil rights movement in this country, or who knows who the President is, has to acknowledge that we’re making progress. But as people like Rush Limbaugh show us, we’re still far from living in a post-racial society and we all have a lot of work to do.

The work of Frantz Fanon suggests an answer that is slightly off this spectrum.  Rather than addressing the issue of the responsibility of the creators of the dominant or colonial culture, Fanon discusses culture as a revolutionary project in colonized society.  According to Fanon, not only should people whose cultures have been colonized or appropriated create their own work, but they must do so if their culture is to survive.  Fanon sees culture as dynamic, as constantly growing and changing, as something vibrant and alive.  When the colonial stamp is put on culture, it solidifies and ossifies, becoming, in Fanon’s words, “the dregs of culture, its mineral strata.”  The colonizers then cling to this snapshot of culture, denying the oppressed people the right to innovation, using the mineral strata of colonized culture to maintain the status quo, which becomes the frame of colonizer and colonized.

Fanon does not believe that mainstream, white, Western culture is an appropriate battleground for decolonization, partly because the cultures of the colonized peoples are marked and can be used to reify and reinforce the colonial structure.  Fanon advises that such culture should not be emulated or aspired to:

So, my brothers, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than to follow that same Europe?

That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.

Come, then, comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different.  We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe.

- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

So what would Fanon make of something like I Didn’t Dream of Dragons?  A person from post-colonial India who wants to create a work of colonial literature situated in India but fails because he or she cannot reconcile colonial and Indian cultures?  I think Fanon would ask, why not create something new?  Why stick so slavishly to the rules of colonial and Indian cultures that you cannot create anything?  It is those rules that allow colonialism to function – yes, even the rule that a fantasy novel must contain a tavern, or the rule that no dragon has ever been to India – these are what Fanon was talking about when he referred to the mineral strata of culture.  These are the rules that will always separate, delineate, and mark various people.

Or, put another way, these are the power dynamics that create authors who can’t or won’t write good non-white characters.  Look at the issue of RaceFail from a Butlerian perspective: rather than asking why the authors in positions of power are insensitive to issues of race, we ask what the relations of power are that produce these authors.

Who are the authors of science fiction and fantasy, and how did they come to be counted as such?  In other words, what makes you an sf/f author?  As “I Didn’t Dream of Dragons” suggests, there are certain rules, or tropes, that can serve as identifiers of the fantasy genre: dragons, taverns, princesses, etc.  So an sf/f author follows certain sf/f tropes, certain general fiction tropes, etc.  The author writes a certain way, has a certain number of fans, is published by a certain sort of publisher.  Some of the RaceFail argument centered around whether non-writers even had the standing to criticize writers, which means that there’s even more potentially at stake for deciding who gets to count as an author and who does not.

All this is to say that there exists a certain cultural milieu in which a certain kind of work is demanded and some writers were selected to meet that demand, and so these writers can hardly be blamed for writing the kinds of stories that they are good at writing, that they love writing, and that made them successful.  We have to look at the cultural milieu instead.  Specifically, at what Foucault calls the vehicles of power – in other words, people.  It is people – readers – consumers – who decide what to buy and what not to buy, which in turn tells us who is a science fiction author and who is a fantasy author and who is a nobody who doesn’t count for the purposes of this discussion.  Foucault said that people are not only the vehicles of power, but are simultaneously its point of impact: it is the relations of power that tell people whose work to read and whose to ignore.  Everyone – writers, and readers – is involved in a group relation of power that is responsible for the representation of race in sf/f.

Foucault would say that it is not reasonable to expect the institution of sf/f fandom to offer significant hope for change.  Instead Foucault would rely on “insurrectionary knowledges” – particularly something like a genealogy of the culture of a colonized people – to offer alternatives to the institution.  Remember, the institution works by excluding some people, by placing people in unequal power relations.  Remember, the world of sf/f publishing functions within a capitalist economy.  Foucault and Fanon would probably agree that the only way to win is to play a different game.

I refer to these posts, not to opine on the dropping of c-bombs, but because they illustrate an important part of the postmodernist critique of the political subject.  Specifically, every discourse creates, as a condition of that discourse, a certain set of signs and markers that identify and categorize the participants and include or exclude different participants based on their adherence to and/or deviation from the accepted categories.  Deconstructing this process means putting aside an emphasis on a “person” and their “position” and instead focusing on what persons and positions are made possible by this process.  Twisty, perhaps inadvertently, performs a postmodern critique by calling into question her own identity – is Twisty a real person or a fictional character? – and what it means to be a radical feminist who steps outside the accepted bounds of radical feminist discourse.

Twisty quotes a gloss of Butler’s work that says the following:

She follows postmodernist and poststructuralist practice in using the term “subject” (rather than “individual” or “person”) in order to underline the linguistic nature of our position within what Jacques Lacan terms the symbolic order, the system of signs and conventions that determines our perception of what we see as reality.

To make sense of this it will help to take apart the use of the term “subject.”  Loosely speaking, when we think of the role of the subject in language, we think of the doer – the active agent, the driving force of a sentence, the noun that takes action.  The “I” in “I went to the park.”  The subject of a sentence, then, is, in some sense, what the sentence is about.  “I went to the park” is a sentence about me; “The park is the place that I went” is a sentence about the park.  If you are the subject of a documentary, the documentary is about you.  Subject invokes primacy, and main-idea-ness.  On the other hand, a King also has subjects.  The King isn’t about his subjects – usually the subjects are described in relation to the King.  You can also be subject to something.  If you disobey the King you might be subject to penalties.  With this usage a subject is one who is subordinate to something else.

So the use of “subject” as a term to describe the part of the person that does things serves a dual purpose.  It does not allow us to view a person either as completely subject to her environment or as completely the subject of it.  It complicates the relationship between person and environment and calls into question the nature of that which takes action.

In this light, we can start to comprehend the claim that the subject is constituted by social relations – that it is produced by a discourse, upon which it is always contingent.  We just have to ask the question, what does it take to be a subject?  In other words, what does it take – within the confines of a specific discourse – to be considered someone who the discourse is about?  And the answer, appropriately, is that one must subject one’s self to the conventions of that discourse in order to be a subject within that discourse.

In the radical feminist discourse of IBTP, those conventions are pretty clear.  IBTP is a particularly good example because most of the conventions are explicitly laid out in the FAQ, guidelines for commenters, and the boilerplate “Blamer Terms of Use Agreement”:

New to I Blame the Patriarchy? Cast your jaundiced eye upon this before commenting.

Blamer Terms of Use Agreement

By clicking the “Blame” button, you affirm that you have read and agree to follow the Guidelines for Commenters. If English is your first language, you agree to use spelling, capitalization, and punctuation consistent with recognized conventions governing same. If you are a dude, you affirm that you have read the FAQ twice, and that, whether or not you are an authoritarian, supercilious asshole in life, you will be otherwise on this blog. All commenters are encouraged to begin their posts with a word other than “I.”

The conventions are not only enforced by moderation, but also by a consensus of Blamers.  As this post points out, the censure of Blamers in the comment section can constitute a significant barrier to entry for those who aren’t careful to use the markers of a Blamer and eschew any misogynist, anti-feminist, or otherwise patriarchal markers that they may have picked up in mainstream discourse.  IBTP has categories to describe those who cleave strictly to these rules, and those who deviate in some acceptable way, and those who deviate in an unacceptable way (for instance, to be a “funfem” or a “sex-positive feminist” or a “nice guy” is to take an acceptable non-radfem position from which to argue, and be argued with; to be an “MRA” is to take an unacceptable non-radfem position to argue from).  There are also certain positions that are not well-accounted for, such as the post-modernist feminist position.

This system is fairly robust – it can easily classify most positions and understand them accordingly.  But what happens when someone in the position of “radical feminist” uses a very anti-feminist term like “cuntalina?”  The frame of radical feminist discourse does not contain a position for a radical feminist who uses radically anti-feminist misogynist slurs; as a result, when that happens, the most widespread result is confusion.  The members of the discourse whose bounds were violated demand that the violator provide an account of herself.  How can this happen?  What do you mean?  What are you really saying?  What is the explanation for this event that can re-situate you in the discourse such that you will once again be intelligible to us?

This system of conventions that govern subject-hood – that determine which positions are accepted, and which forbidden, which are understood and which unintelligible – is socially constructed within each community of practice by its members through discourse.  In order to allow ourselves to be heard and understood within a particular social frame, we must take on a subject-position that is both permitted and intelligible.  Butler’s contention is that identity is a retroactive product of these positions – that identity is simply that which allows people to identify us (or us to identify ourselves), and that we are always identified by reference to one or more subject positions that we have taken on.

In the prevailing patriarchal order, oppression often takes the form of a limited choice of subject-positions.  For instance, for a woman to express the view that women are fully human and thus entitled to the same rights and privileges as men is considered a marker of “feminism,” which in the patriarchal frame is understood in a very specific way – “feminism” is associated with hairy, man-hating lesbians, etc etc, such that the term “feminist” itself can be an ad hominem dismissal of a woman’s position in many circles.  Such a frame is immensely powerful and oppressive, and so from the post-modernist perspective, it is not enough simply to fight from the subject-position of “feminist” – which, after all, is understood and accounted for by a patriarchal frame – but also to constantly problematize the meaning of the subject-position “feminist” itself, and in fact to contest all patriarchal assignments of subject-position so as to allow for new and different options for all humans to occupy.

This is the post-structuralist critique in a nutshell: that the potitical contest between two elements of a dichotomy (man vs. woman, black vs. white, bourgeois vs. proletariat, etc) should be secondary to the contesting of the dichotomy itself.  The oppression is not located in one side or the other, but in the structure of the contest.  Twisty implicity recognizes this by blaming not men, but the Patriarchy, a system in which men are dominant but with which women often collaborate.  And by transgressing the bounds of her own discourse, Twisty has demonstrated how jarring it can be when someone transgresses social boundaries that were previously thought inviolable.

It doesn’t take long for any given transgression to be processed, comprehended, and reintegrated into the prevailing social order.  Therefore the goal, from Butler’s point of view, is not to simply find a transgressive position and stay in it, but to constantly bring into view, through transgressions and other strategies, the contingent nature of the categories and subject-positions that we occupy, so that we can learn to recognize and accommodate, rather than ignore and oppress, new and unconventional positions as they arise.

This strategy makes sense from a historical point of view.  Historically, the women’s movement has always gained some synergy from other movements or events challenging the prevailing social order – from Wollstonecraft’s deployment of classical liberalism to argue in favor of education for women, to the increases in women’s rights that came about after WWII made “Rosie the Riveter” a valid subject-position.  If this is true, it also follows that an increase in the recognition of women who occupy non-patriarchal subject-positions would also synergistically make more subject-positions available to other oppressed classes of people.  This is why any study of the resistance to power and oppression is heavily staked in feminist movements, post-colonial movements, etc.

Speaking of post-colonial, I hope to follow up this post with a commentary on RaceFail ’09 from a post-colonial perspective, specifically using Fanon to deconstruct some of the assumptions floating around about race and culture.  RaceFail is also of interest because the subject-position of an author seems to be of critical importance to many participants.

How is this related to panoptic power?  Economic competition conforms closely to the panoptic model of power.  Let us compare economic competition to the two hallmarks of the panopticon:  self-surveillance, and isolation.

In the panopticon, self-surveillance is produced within a subject by causing that subject to behave as though at any moment she might be under surveillance by a central observer.  Who is the central observer of the competitive market?  The consumer.  At any time, the consumer might evaluate the quality of the products offered up for sale by the competitors.  Competitors earn reputations based on the quality of their products, and these reputations greatly affect the profits of the competitors.  The consumer is also somewhat unpredictable, in that one never knows exactly what a consumer’s preferences might be.  Perhaps your innovative new product might become the next iPod – or perhaps it might become the next Betamax. Competitors must strive towards innovation and invention and reinvention, and must also master marketing, and still success is not guaranteed.  The point here is that competitors are always being evaluated, and they may live or die based on the results of these evaluations.  This is a powerful incentive towards self-surveillance.

In the panopticon, isolation is caused by physically separating prisoners in individual cells.  In a competitive market economy, isolation comes in the form of patents, trade secrets, and the information asymmetries that arise when competing agents each try to find and maintain a competitive edge.  If you own a restaurant, you might make the best marinara sauce in the county, but if you give away your secret recipe, that will not be the case for long.  Isolation also comes from the fact that individual agents may earn more profits through competition than through cooperation – because there will be fewer people to share the wealth.  Laws against cartelization and other forms of corporate cooperation can produce isolation effects.  In a situation where workers are competing for jobs, the workers may become isolated from each other because some wish to go on strike for higher wages while others wish to take over their jobs.

If the productive power of a competitive market is related to the productive power of the panopticon, then do the same downsides exist?  Sure.  One of these is that PD-like situations may arise in which competitors end up reaching a suboptimal equilibrium state because of their isolation.  An example of this is an industry in which advertising costs comprise a significant percentage of the industry’s income but do not effect a significant redistribution of market share for any one firm nor attract a significant number of new buyers to the market.  Each firm would be better off if no firm advertised, but if any firm advertises, they all must in order to avoid losses.  In the end every firm advertises, and the entire industry essentially throws money away.  The tobacco industry is one such example (although you won’t hear me mourning their suboptimal profits.)  There are also cases like railroads or utilities where, without collusion or intervention, redundant services may be established (imagine the case of two competing rail lines running parallel to each other).

Because the effects of panoptic power are generally experienced as difficult and unpleasant, free markets tend toward a mix of competition and cooperation.  Many agents would like to collude with each other in order to avoid the panoptic effects – in other words, break isolation to resist the power of the panopticon.  A cartel is a good example of this – competitors get together and decide that rather than compete with each other, they’ll fix prices and production at a certain level so they can all profit equally.  These cartels often result in higher prices and lower quality and quantity for goods produced – they are less productive, but they make things easier for those involved.  Labor unions are a form of cartel for workers, who agree to band together to achieve higher labor prices (wages) and shorter working hours (less production).  Such cartels and unions suffer from the risk that one agent will defect or a new agent will enter the market, thus destroying the cartel or union, and as a result an equilibrium can be reached.

The free market, which depends on competition for its functioning, is thus an example of panoptic power at work.  This is an important insight because many experience panoptic power as something which imprisons them, which calls into question how much “freedom” agents in the free market actually have and provides a theoretical framework to contrast, rather than conflate, liberty and productivity.

Basically, your goal is to collect money and property – as much as possible, by any means available.

Most people are probably familiar with Monopoly, which makes it a good example for a thought experiment.

Imagine that four friends are playing Monopoly and a fifth friend shows up and asks to get into the game even though some number of turns have already passed.  How can this fifth friend be integrated into the game?

One way is to start the person the way everyone else started: at Go, with $1500 and a pair of dice.  The beginning is the logical place to start, after all.  This method presents problems, though.  The four original players have had many turns to increase their wealth and their earning potential.  Many good properties have already been bought.  Monopolies may have already been established.  Depending on how late in the game it is, this fifth player may be at some great disadvantage.  Imagine if 90% of the properties on the board are already owned.  The fifth player has virtually no chance of winning – of surviving on the board – under these circumstances.

Another way is to grant the person some portion of the money/property on the board.  You could total the value of the properties each player owns, average the totals, and then randomly assign the new player  unowned properties until that average is approximated.  You could do the same for money.  However, if there isn’t enough unowned property to do this, you’d have to take property away from some of the players who are already playing.  How can this be done fairly?  Should the property be taken from the winning player(s), or equally from all?

Another way is to simply restart the game.  This isn’t necessarily fair to the players who were doing well – their good luck and good strategy ends up going unrewarded.  However, the player(s) who think(s) he/she/they would have won can at least declare victory in this case.  I have found that generally speaking
this is the most oft-chosen option for inserting a new player into an existing game, for the simple reason that usually at least half of the players are not winning and usually the choice of methods comes down to a loosely democratic vote:  All of the players who are losing choose to restart.

Aside from the highly practical use that this line of thinking has in actually inserting new players into existing games – a situation I have encountered in life from time to time – we can also consider the larger implications, like when we insert new players into the more realistic economic systems presented by, for instance, the economy.  Imagine, for instance, that half the population of some country was playing some game analogous to Monopoly – attempting to acquire money and property and personal enrichment – for years, or decades, or centuries.  Imagine then that the other half demanded to be inserted into the game.  How would we fairly insert these newcomers?

Obviously this question is not simply theoretical.  Various large population groups have been granted property rights in our history – women, for instance, and blacks – rights which amount to $1500 and a pewter thimble.  These groups were then allowed to compete freely with the people who already owned almost all of the property, people who were busily going through the Monopoly winning strategies of bankrupting whoever they could and consolidating and developing their assets.

Just letting someone into the game doesn’t establish fairness.  These groups weren’t really given a chance.  Even those who did start off with some property – many former slaves were given land during Reconstruction, and women could always inherit an estate from a husband or father – were still at a disadvantage.  Imagine starting a game of Monopoly with a house on Baltic Avenue when another player has hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place.

In the game of the American economy, women, blacks, and immigrant groups have had to claw their way up from the bottom with the help of luck, charity, and government aid.  It’s no wonder that the players who are already winning want to deny entry to immigrants, why they fought to keep women from having the right to own property.  It’s no wonder that the players who aren’t doing so well want to restart the game and distribute everything evenly.  But when we assess some data – the wage gap between men and women, for instance – it’s important to keep in mind that some of the players started late.  If women owned half the property and controlled half the wealth in the American economy, would there still be a wage gap?

And before we say that some group has had enough opportunity to improve their lot, let’s ask ourselves how many turns we would need before we caught up in a game of Monopoly if we started fifty turns late.

Again, no solution presents itself.  What is fairness?  How can all players be satisfied with a solution?  Certainly whatever happens, it will require the cooperation of people who don’t currently acknowledge that there is a significant problem with how the game was set up in the first place.

A few years ago I was struck by the phrase “authentic human desire.” I am not quite sure who I was reading at the time – it strikes me that it was related to Žižek in some way, but that may be because I’m going to relate my analysis back to Freud and Lacan. Something about the backlash against the OSBP brought all this stuff into my head and provoked a strong reaction – almost a defensiveness.

The OSBP was basically a con game where people (and by people I mean women) could opt into a system where other people (and here we’d assume that these other people would predominantly be men) could ask them, without penalty, “could I touch your breasts.”  If the woman says no, the dude has to respect that, and if she says yes, he gets to touch her breasts.  Those in favor of this project pointed out that it was a more open and honest way to interact.  Those against the project seemed likely to condemn men for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts, or at least for expressing that desire to the woman.

So let’s start with a question:  should men be condemned for wanting to touch a woman’s breasts?  The phrase “authentic human desire” presents us with a test.  What does it mean for a desire to be authentic and human?  What would it mean, on the other hand, for a desire not to be these things?  For a desire to be inauthentic is for it to be fraudulent, or manufactured; for a desire to be non-human is for it to be derived, artificial, or somehow non-essential.  One might say that some desires are inherent to human beings, while others are socially constructed, and then one might argue about which are which.  If we say that it is natural for a man to want to touch a woman’s breasts, is that to say that it is unnatural for a man not to?  Some would consider homosexuality unnatural, inauthentic, inhuman.  But that is a double-edged sword, for if we claim that homosexuality is socially constructed onto a heterosexual essence, we give social construction enough power to completely remove the influences of nature, and in doing so we lose the ability to claim that one thing or another is natural – if homosexuality could be socially constructed, then so could heterosexuality – so could anything.

What this suggests is that a test of normality or majority is insufficient to tell us whether a particular desire is an authentic human desire or is simply a desire created by society.  Does a man want to touch a woman’s breasts because he is a man, or because our culture has inundated him with images of breasts and of female subservience and objectification?  We can’t tell just by pointing out the ubiquity of breast-fetishization – after all, breasts are often the most prominent and obvious difference between men and women and so make sense for the oppressors to use as an identifier of the oppressed class.  If we accept this explanation, then the desire to touch women’s breasts is a desire that men have to touch the symbol of women’s oppression, in other words, to take possession of a woman using the tools that society presents as being for that purpose.  Not an authentic human desire, but one that is taught, from patriarch to patriarch, passed down through the generations.

On the other hand, what if we look at the desire to touch breasts as a manifestation of the desire for contact, recognition, and acceptance?  What if we accept theferrett’s exaplanation at face value, and accept that rather than trying to own or dominate these women, he really was just trying to heal a part of himself that he felt was broken during his coming of age?  Lacanian psychoanalysis describes the state of an infant as having a sense of wholeness and completeness, where all of the infant’s needs are automatically met by the mother.  According to Lacan, the lack that a person feels when he is separated from this state of ultimate completeness is the cause of all desire.  If we look at breasts the way an infant does – as a source of comfort and nourishment – then we can see a psychological root for the desire for breasts.  It is a simple manifestation of basic human need.  To touch a woman’s breasts is to connect to a state of comfort and well-being and healing.

If the desire for contact, to touch and be touch, accept and be accepted, need and be needed, is an authentic human one, then women share this desire with men.  The OSBP should work.  So what’s the problem?

Well, first of all, Lacan has often been criticized for perpetuating the sexism of Freud’s analysis.  And indeed, we’ve accounted for male desires more than adequately using Lacan, but we do not seem to have accounted for, or even located, female desires.

Second, and more important, is that we have not begun to talk about power.

Some commentators have suggested that, to put this thing in perspective, the dudes should partake in some thought experiment.  One suggestion was that men ought to be groped as well, and this seems to have been implemented to some extent.  Someone asked how men would like to have their testicles groped and fondled by complete strangers.  I daresay most of the male OSBP participants would respond “very much, thank you.”  Another person suggested that women play a version where they kick men in the testicles.  The problems that all of these thought experiments share is that none of them are actually analogous to what is going on in the OSBP.

Theferrett and his friends are right about one thing.  A situation in which man M desires to touch a woman’s breasts and woman W desires her breasts to be touched does present M and W with a certain lack of efficiency in having their desires met.  How are M and W to find each other, and how are they to communicate their desires in a socially acceptable way?  The OSBP tries to find a solution to this problem by outfitting W with a certain marker and presenting M with a certain routine that is guaranteed to be socially acceptable to those who are marked.  Now, putting aside questions outside of this system (such as its potential for abuse by those who violate the system’s rules, or the social implications of the fetishization of breasts), what is wrong with this system itself?

Keep your answers in mind, because really, the OSBP is just an unambiguous version of the system we have now.  Now, women are outfitted with certain markers that declare whether or not they are to be approached and in what ways, and men approach them in ways that are influenced by these markers, and women either consent or not, and men are supposed to accept a refusal graciously, but they might not.  The problem with the system we have now is that it contains ambiguities – a man might incorrectly read a certain outfit as a marker of a certain attitude, for instance, a low-cut skirt as an invitation to a cat-call or a come-on, for instance.  A green button, however, is unambiguous, and nobody is going to mistake a red button for a green one (except someone who is red-green colorblind, that is.)  Also, in the non-OSBP system, a man might not ask before touching, because of context and signals and body language – he might be wrong, or he might be right, and it can be hard to tell.  In the OSBP, the man asks before touching, because it is an explicit rule, or he violates an explicit rule unambiguously.

So far, this system sounds better.  Fewer ambiguities mean that malicious men can be caught, identified, and ostracized more easily, based on criteria that everyone agreed to beforehand.  There’s less potential for a man to accidentally push a woman farther than she is willing to go, or to intimidate a woman by making unwanted advances.  Men can feel free to express their desires and women can feel safe to be desired, all without social awkwardness.

Enter the workings of power.  The idea that making the expression of desire more efficient is good is based on the idea that the expression of desire is itself good, and that more of it would make things better.  It certainly seems better for M and W, who want to touch and be touched.  But we can’t look at expected value without taking the bad with the good.

First, let’s look at the men’s side.  The man wants to touch some breasts.  In a normal social setting, he fears both rejection and punishment if he asks to touch a woman’s breasts.  Even if she accepts, people might still hear about how he propositioned some random woman, and he may still endure social punishment.  A man also does not have a reliable way to find the women who would say yes.  So, a low chance of success coupled with fear of rejection and fear of punishment cause these men to refrain from asking the boob question.  In the OSBP, the man has a reliable way to avoid punishment and a better chance of finding women who will say yes to him.  Greater chance of reward, no chance of punishment, lower chance of rejection.  OSBP is a win for the man.

Now, let’s look at the woman’s side.  In a normal social setting, a woman fears that men will make unwanted sexual advances.  A woman also fears that if she rejects the man, he will sexually assault her.  The kind of man willing to break social convention enough to ask her if he can touch her breasts may also break social convention enough to do it anyway if she says no.  A woman has to be careful of what she wears lest some man interpret her outfit as a license to assault her.  A woman has some reason to fear whenever a man desires her.  In the OSBP, does the woman stop fearing unwanted advances?  Does she stop fearing sexual assault?  Does she stop fearing misinterpretation?  Does she stop fearing that the rules will be broken?  Maybe she can feel safer letting someone touch her breasts knowing that they are are following social convention, and maybe she has less reason to fear misinterpretation, and so maybe she can feel somewhat better off than in the non-OSBP.

However, overall, the stakes for a woman are much higher per desire-transaction.  It is not clear that reducing somewhat the risks that a woman takes in any single desire-transaction reduces overall risk if the number of desire-transactions increases drastically.  I want to make clear that a woman experiences taking these risks even if there are no rule-breakers.  The question is not how men behave, but how power behaves.  The thing about the OSBP that is objectionable boils down to this:  it is a system in which imbalanced power transactions are encouraged to take place.  These transactions may well be balanced somewhat better than normal social interactions between men and women, but they are still imbalanced.

I would describe OSBP as generally sex-positive and societal norms as generally sex-negative.  The problem with any sex-positive project is that it threatens to simply repeat the oppressive patriarchal norms built into society, which OSBP does pretty clearly.  However, without sex-positive projects, there is nothing to challenge patriarchal sexual norms.  That doesn’t give a hall pass to all sex-positive projects; we have to rate them on their merits.  One that’s just about dudes groping boobs isn’t likely to challenge much; on the other hand, if the participants (specifically the female ones) can say that they were able to safely express and fulfill their desires, can we afford to ignore a system that really was able decrease a woman’s risk-per-transaction?

Of course what really killed the OSBP were the externalities.  The things outside of the system.  The fact that the focus on breasts plays into issues of the male gaze and objectification and self-surveillance and the breaking down of women into their component parts, and the fact that there are people who would be encouraged by the system to go outside the system, both make the considerations of the relative merits of OSBP itself nearly irrelevant.

The question I want to leave with is this:  Given the authentic human desires – for connectedness, wholeness, contact, recognition, acceptance – and given the imbalance of power between men and women, is there a system that can actually allow these desires to be expressed and fulfilled in a safe, fair, and balanced way?  Or do we have to keep muddling along, occasionally blundering into our own OSBPs-in-miniature, repressed and disconnected and alienated from the rest of humanity?

Let me explain that claim a little more. It is safe to say that laborers are under direct and indirect surveillance. An example of direct surveillance would be when a foreman or supervisor actually watches the laborers and directs their activities. An example of indirect surveillance would be an inspector who checks the laborers’ work for defects. In either case, the laborers must constantly behave as though they are under surveillance – hence they regulate their own behavior to fit the standards imposed on them from outside. These standards are imposed through a fear of punishment. If the work is defective, the laborer may be docked. If the laborer behaves the wrong way he may be suspended or fired.

With the intervention of the labor union, workers have a degree of protection from arbitrary discipline. The supervisor or inspector has a burden of proof to satisfy if action is to be taken. The laborer can work knowing that his membership in the union provides a degree of protection from the surveilling authorities. The more powerful the union, or symbolic agent, the more protection the worker, or acting agent, has. The same is true for citizens of powerful countries – the symbolic agent – the king, or president, or country itself – has a power that allows its citizens to act with greater freedom. At the same time, the cost of this freedom is a loss of agency. This may seem paradoxical, however, we can see how a displacement of agency allows greater freedom of action with the simple phrase, “I didn’t do it.” Americans benefit from the privilege of America’s dominance at the same time as many or most of America’s inhabitants disavow their responsibility for the actions which lead to this dominance. Hence the soldier who is just following orders or the taxpayer who is just doing his share for society – yet their money and their lives are used to maintain America’s power in the world at a deadly cost for all who oppose us. Our privilege as Americans comes from a lack of self-surveillance: we do not carefully watch and regulate our actions because we do not fear the consequences of carelessness.

If cooperation and membership both serve to attack the basis of panoptic power, what is the cost of these tactics? The cooperating prisoner takes a risk – the risk that the other prisoners will defect. The member of an organization sacrifices their agency in return for the power of privilege. It seems then that the two goals of any project to mitigate panoptic power should be to decrease the risks of cooperation on the one hand, and to combat the displacement of agency on the other. How can either of these goals be accomplished? A question for the future.

Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. “You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.”

First of all, what’s in a name? “The Prisoner’s Dilemma” tells us about a dilemma faced by a prisoner – note the placement of the apostrophe. In this example, though, there are two prisoners, and they both face the same dilemma. Why, then, do we not see this dilemma called “The Prisoners’ Dilemma?”

Well, the dilemma only comes about as a result of the separation of the two prisoners into individuals. If there were one player controlling both prisoners and trying to maximize her score, she’d have no dilemma. The Prisoner’s Dilemma, however, is faced by one individual, alone, isolated from contact with her fellow prisoner.

That leads to another question: why a prisoner? There are plenty of ways to propose the same paradigm – for example, two students who turned in identical examinations. Or an invading army offering a reward for whoever will open the town’s gates at midnight. The point is there are any number of anecdotes that match the payoff matrix of the PD, and perhaps infinitely many could be invented. Prisoners were chosen – why?

On some level, the prisoner’s dilemma applied to prisoners is well-understood. Plenty of people enjoy the legal drama as a story – plenty of people have been exposed, in our time, to Law and Order, Homicide, or CSI, and these modern shows have predecessors, and those predecessors use tropes set up in literature.

I would argue, however, that the choice of prisoners goes deeper than a simple familiarity. There is a match in situation between a prisoner and one caught in the prisoner’s dilemma. In other words, if this same problem were explained using students caught cheating instead of criminals caught robbing a bank, the students would still feel trapped. They would still feel like prisoners. And the person who reads the dilemma sympathizes with the subjects of the dilemma and feels their sense of being trapped. The situation that we call the Prisoner’s Dilemma works because of panoptic power, and panoptic power makes its subjects into prisoners, much more than it makes them into students, or frightened villagers.

When I say that people sympathize with the subjects of the dilemma, I mean, the reaction intended by the framing of the dilemma is that the reader puts herself in the place of the prisoner. The reader must ask “What would I do if offered such a deal,” and not “What would I do if I were the prosecutor and I had two prisoners?”

And that brings up another quite interesting point. We are told explicitly what the preferences of the prisoners are: they want to maximize their freedom, even to the detriment of their partner in crime. We are never told the goal of the prosecutor, although the prosecutor’s actions seem to speak for themselves. The prosecutor’s goal is, simply, to get convictions – to maximize jail time for the two prisoners. In our legal system, prosecutors build their careers by putting people in jail. If the goal of the prosecutor were to find out the truth, the Prisoner’s Dilemma would not be an effective tool. Imagine that one prisoner committed a crime and the other prisoner just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who would be more likely to confess a crime, thus putting the other person in jail, and who would be more likely to maintain her innocence, thus going to jail?

If the panoptic model helps to maximize power, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma uses the panoptic model on behalf of authority, then it is a blind authority whose power is maximized. The authority does not care about the well-being of the society it has authority over; it is merely concerned with maintaining its own power. And indeed, this relationship is reflected by the names of the moves in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: defect and cooperate.

To defect is to cooperate with the authorities. To cooperate is to be defective from the point of view of the authority – a defective, criminal citizen, a defector, a saboteur of civil authority. The terms “defect” and “cooperate” refer to a presumed partnership between the two prisoners. I say presumed because nowhere in the description of the Dilemma is it stated or implied that the two prisoners have made any kind of agreement about how to handle such an eventuality as being placed into the Dilemma. The two prisoners are presumed to be partners only in the sense of (allegedly) participating in a criminal activity together; since nothing is stated about their guilt or innocence it may well be that neither of them has even met the other. The two are described as “accomplices,” but accomplices who prioritize each other’s well-being much lower than their own – in other words, hardly friends, or compatriots, or long-term partners in any sense.

However, the term “defect” implies something defected from, some country or alliance. Again, the term cooperate is ambiguous – the prisoners can cooperate with each other or with the authorities. We’ve already established that the authorities do not have the best interests of the prisoners in mind, and now we also establish that if the prisoners are to do any cooperating, it will be with each other, against the authorities. The authorities want to gain power by destroying the bonds of cooperation and causing someone to defect from society; the prisoners want to remain free by holding together as a society.

The choices could have been named differently. Confession could have been called cooperation – and certainly if we view the game from the perspective of the prosecutor, a confession would be a way for a prisoner to cooperate. However, again, the PD puts us in the place of the Prisoner, who is depicted as being in society with other prisoners but not with the prosecutor or the authorities.

Again, the PD does not have to be expressed in these terms that suggest that authority is opposed to, rather than part of, society. It doesn’t have to, but it is, and I consider this highly significant. The PD is not a dilemma about how we get justice – it is a dilemma about how we get freedom. And the freedom of the reduced sentences is not simply a freedom from jail, but a freedom from the power that would turn us against each other in pursuit of its own anti-social goals.

This same student of feminist thought would be very unlikely to encounter certain other
theories, thinkers, or schools of thought, or if they were encountered, they’d be likely to be presented negatively, misrepresented, or dismissed as irrelevant for one reason or another. This is not an attack on the feminist movement – merely an observation that, in any movement or school of thought, there are areas of particular interest that are studied in great depth, and there are areas of no particular interest that are not studied at all. I could easily level the same critique against economics. In fact, I arguably already have, when I said that Libertarian thought needed to be reevaluated in the face of certain postmodern theories. I’ve spoken a bit about some of the formulations of power that will inform this project of deconstruction and reconstruction, so now, I’d like to talk a little bit about the economic side of things. My project here is to begin to lay the foundations for my postmodern theory of economics.

According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of economics is “a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” Let’s deconstruct this definition a little. What is a good, and what is a service? The definition implies that these things are produced, distributed, and consumed. When we think about what these words mean to us, we think of mass-marketing, of a consumer economy, of production in factories, of distribution centers. Most importantly we think of money, of supply and demand, in other words, of price. The mainstream of economic thought deals only with things that have a price, things that are bought and sold. Money is the ultimate measure by which economic success or failure is determined. As many feminists have noted, this leads to a tendency to ignore or erase the goods and services that are not bought and sold for money. For example, the work of a housewife does not have a readily identifiable price, and so mainstream economics ignores it.

Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian school of economics, deconstructs the nature of goods. He specifically rejects a definition of goods based on an inherent property of the thing. Rather, he claims that a thing acquires “goods-character” under certain circumstances based on the needs, perceptions, and abilities of the subject or subjects who regard the thing as a good. Menger admits that these characteristics could conceivably describe “family connections, friendship, love, religious and scientific fellowships, etc” although he also admits that he has his doubts as to whether these things are really goods. In any case, Menger’s work makes the important point that the traditional definition of goods is overly limited, and that it ignores things that have obvious value – things that obviously meet human needs. His work also opens the door for us to include things like human relationships, love, friendship, et al. in our economic analyses.

Although Menger made these claims in Principles of Economics, a book published in 1871, most economists continue to ignore the “goods-character” of relationships, of the many services Weeks describes in her overview of “women’s labor,” and of countless other things that people use to satisfy their needs.

The more fundamental concept behind goods and services, then, are human needs. Goods and services are not useful in a universal or a priori sense due to their inherent or essential properties. Rather, they are useful to a particular entity because of that entity’s needs. And behind the production, distribution, and consumption of these goods and services, there are people producing, distributing, and consuming. Who are these people, and why do they produce, distribute, and consume? The people are acting agents, and they produce, distribute, and consume goods and services in order to meet their needs. Therefore one could say that in a broader sense, economics is the study of how people act to meet their needs.

However, I think the word “needs” is problematic. I prefer to follow both Lacan and Mises, among others, and use the term “desires.” “Needs” are things that people cannot live without, like food, water, shelter, etc. Desires are what people want. People desire specific foods, specific drinks, specific shelters. People desire things that they don’t need in order to live. People even sometimes desire some things more than life – think of a person who gives his or her life for a cause – and so desires can outweigh needs.

So for now we can talk about economics as the study of how people meet their desires. Earlier I described these people as “acting agents” – a term I’ve used before in my descriptions of metonymic power. Underlying the concept of an acting agent are questions of agency (to what extent to we determine our own actions?) and identity (who are “we” in the first place?) that I will not go into just yet. Let me just address any concerns with this approach by proposing an amendment to the commonly held definition of “action.” Usually, action refers to a behavior that was done on purpose, as opposed to a behavior that was done by accident. Picking up a glass of water is an action; spilling a glass of water that you were not aware of is not an action. I would like to specify that “purpose” is not necessarily a conscious purpose. In other words, actions may not be the result of a conscious process. Suffice it to say that they are the result of some process, or of different processes, and that at this time I would like to leave open the possibility that these processes are conscious or unconscious, individual or social, freely chosen or determined, or that they break out of these dichotomies entirely.

So the question of who or what is acting shall be deferred (but only temporarily) and we shall simply state now that it is possible to observe individual and group behavior and try to discern some purpose to the behavior, to account for the behavior in some way.

We started by deconstructing a definition of economics, changing its terms to suit broader and deeper meanings, and in doing so arrived at some fundamental observations and the questions raised by them. Now let us reconstruct economics based on these observations.(1)

We can observe individual and group behavior and try to discern some purpose to the behavior – in other words, why does the person or group behave in this way? We can infer that there is some underlying force that prompts the behavior, and we can call this force “desire.” We could also call it need, impulse, drive, will, or any host of other terms with different backgrounds and implications. So we can say that people (individually or in groups) act to satisfy their desires, based on our observations, as long as we remember that we must restrict or expand the definitions of desires and actions in order to fit our observations.

If an action implies a desire, it also implies an expectation of a causal relationship between the result of the action and the satisfaction of the desire. In other words, people behave in ways that they expect will make them better off. It is important to remember that this expectation is also not necessarily a conscious process. When a dog barks near us we might have a fight-or-flight reaction: we jump, our norepinephine is released, followed by adrenaline, we look around to assess the threat. We do this because of our instincts, not our conscious minds. Our instincts may not think, or have expectations, precisely in the way we think about thinking or expecting as conscious processes. However, (we infer that) our instincts developed in response to situations in which following those instincts led to better results than not following them.

(Can evolution be looked at in economic terms? Of course. We can do cost-benefit analyses of various evolved traits and see which are likely to give a survival advantage. We can attempt to approximate the expected value of a trait. We can track various traits and various competing organisms and observe which of them have the highest market share, and from that information make conclusions about which strategies are strong and which are weak. Economic competition and evolutionary competition function exactly the same way. We can’t say that an individual mutation has a “purpose” in that mutations are accidental, but we can say that the purpose of life seems to be survival based on the behaviors of living things. We can’t say that a trait has an “expectation” in that evolved traits are not conscious, but we can say that past success leads to an expectation of future success.)

To recap:  we have behavior + purpose = action, where purpose = desire + expectation.  When we frame economics as the study of how people act to satisfy their desires, we take the desires as given.  The reason for this is simple: economics is not concerned with what the desires are.  Ethics, psychology, and many other fields are dedicated to the question of why people want the things they want, and what, if anything, they ought to want instead.  Economics is concerned, rather, with what people do given certain desires.  Remember, in our economic epistemology, the only way to know what desires are – or even that desires are – is to infer them from behaviors.

Before I finish I’d just like to bring two terms to the table and define them very specifically using the construction of economics I’ve presented here.  These terms are utility and value.  Menger discussed “useful things” – this usefulness is what I will call utility.  Marx called it use-value.  Utility is how useful something is – the perceived capacity of a certain item to satisfy a desire.  Remember, as Menger said, this is not owing to any specific property of the item in question – rather, it is the person’s perception of the item that gives it utility.  Utility is subjective: it is based entirely on the evaluation of the subject, because useful always means useful to someone.  Utility is also independent – an item’s utility is not based upon the utility of any other item, or on any other observable or quantifiable amount.  Some economists have adopted the convention of “measuring” utility in units, called utils – but I resist this and any attempts to enumerate utility, because it leads us to think of utility – and therefore desires – as subject to the laws of mathematics.  Utility is only discoverable by observation of an action – we can ony say an item was useful if someone used it.  We can’t measure how happy that use made them, nor how well their desire was satisfied – these things are subjective and unquantifiable.

Value is how much something is worth.  Like utility, value is also subjective – something is always worth something to someone.  Unlike utility, value is relative.  When we say an object is worth something, we always need a “something” for comparison.  Value is only discoverable through observation of an exchange – if someone trades one of Object A for three of Object B, we can say that that particular Object A was worth less to them than three Object Bs.

An important note here is that someone can make claims about their utility and value judgments, in other words, about their preferences – but in the case of value, these claims cannot be verified, and in the case of utility, they can’t even be properly understood (for instance, how do you explain to someone else exactly how much you like to eat an apple?)  The only way we can infer what people desire in an economically rigorous way is by observing their behavior.

It is of paramount importance, however, when considering these observations, to recall Frederic Bastiat’s words:  “the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.“  When looking at an exchange, what is really being exchanged?  Let’s use the Traveler’s Dilemma as an example.  The game theorist expects a “rational” player to play (2), assuming that the person values money and (2) is the play that will result in the greatest amount of money.  Instead the TD player more often picks (100), valuing the chance to win more money over the certainty of winning very little money, or alternately values losing a small amount of money over losing a large amount of money.  What is being “exchanged” here is not just money, but chances, certainties, potentials, and opportunities.  Money can be seen, and so many economists make the mistake of seeing only money.

*****

(1): I’d like to acknowledge my indebtedness to praxeology as presented in Human Action by Ludwig von Mises, whose methodology I closely followed in establishing a foundation for a new construction of economics.  I am in many places simply refining his positions and insights with postmodern tropes, although I believe that this will come to represent a substantial deviation from his work by clarifying some of his underlying assumptions and thus demonstrating the conditional nature of some of his conclusions.