A call for an economics of the absurd

from Peter Radford

While I realize many of you think economics is already absurd, I don’t think it is absurd enough. This is my call for an economics of the absurd.

Huh?

This all came about after, at the suggestion of an actor friend of mine, I wrote a play about Antonin Artaud the French intellectual, poet, and playwright. My play went nowhere, rightly so as it wasn’t very good, but I learned a lot about modern theater along the way. Specifically I learned about Artaud’s attempts to shake theater from its stuffy and all too correct ways during the 1930′s and 1940′s. For the less theatric amongst you this all requires an explanation, so here goes:

Artaud was insane. Indeed he spent much of his adult life in and out of insane asylums and being subjected to all sorts of horrendous electric shock therapy. He ended up dying of cancer while living at an asylum just outside of Paris. For someone who was an utter failure as a writer of poetry and plays – his only full scale play ran for only a very short and dismal time – he has had enormous influence. His methods were odd to say the least, and his writing extreme in both content and style. His emergence from his insanity just at the end of World War II rescued him from obscurity, and by the time of his death a few years later he was a legend in the French intellectual circles. He earned his reputation the hard way: he was kicked out of the surrealist movement for being too surrealistic.

Why do we remember him?

Because of his notion of the theater of the absurd. A concept that has influenced the way in which modern theater presents itself, and the way in which drama embraces not just the word, but the entire experiential context as well.

Artaud’s problem was simple: he vastly mistrusted words. He saw them as hopelessly inadequate in their expression of the sensation or vision he had inside his head. He may see red, but the word ‘red’ utterly failed to communicate the substance of his experience. His furious search for greater accuracy led him deeper into internal conflict and hence into greater insanity. Words to Artaud were thus a grotesque distortion of the truth. They carried a huge cost. Their simplification and approximation destroyed the essence of what he wanted to convey. In essence: words, the very basis of his craft as a writer, became a blockage between reality and his description of it.

His solution was also simple: destroy the existing conventions of the theater and replace them with a much richer alternative, one in which words were augmented by noises, colors, intense activity, gesticulations, bold shapes, oversized sets, and distorted emotions. In other words he upended the conventional wisdom in an attempt to infuse drama with reality, by calling attention to the complexity of the context in which words are meant to convey their meaning. It was this destruction of the old theatrical notion, and its replacement with a much more realistic and challenging dramatic method that he called the theater of the absurd. His choice of title was both to call attention to the absurdity of the older conventions, and to the melange of experience he imbued his new method with. It is not stretching history too far to suggest that contemporary theater owes a great deal to Artaud, or that recent theater can be divided in to pre- and post-Artaud periods.

How does this relate to economics?

Modern orthodoxy is exactly the kind of cramped, limited, diminished, and inadequate representation of reality that Artaud encountered in French theater in the 1920′s. His scream – literally – was a reaction to that inadequacy. Just as drama in that period was stuffy and complacent, so too is economics today. Just as theater back then was tightly controlled and demanded strict loyalty to the prevailing wisdom, so too does modern economics. The same lackluster repetition of the same old rules and ideas dominate both. Both value conformity over novelty. Both squeeze out reality in order to enforce simple interpretations. Both call for the sacrifice of detail and the eventual elimination of the most essential of all ingredients: human emotion. Just as Artaud saw the actors of his day as dry, grayed out automatons, so modern economics populates its theories with robot like agents incapable of human feelings or even life.

The pent up energy of our modern economics discipline is contained within too many conventions. There are too many conflicting schools of thought, none of which can properly claim superiority, and yet orthodoxy does just that. As a result it stifles progress. We remain stuck in ever increasing detail, either afraid of change or convinced that change is unnecessary. The bitterness underneath the surface is belied by the polite exchange above. The frustration of those who are outside the self sustaining establishment has reached a fever pitch. Especially in view of the catastrophic implosion that the recent crisis seems to represent. Orthodoxy is exposed as irrelevant. Yet there appears no way of getting it off the stage. At least politely.

The hubris of our leading economists is now not justified by what they know. For, in light of the crisis, they apparently know little.

Artaud would suggest a primal scream at this point. A scream to relieve the tension and to demarcate a line. Beyond that line is the new. And we need the new.

My own view, which rests on my idiosyncratic journey through banking and business, is that no economic explanation is worth much if it fails to account for the context – what I call the ‘basis’ – within which the activity takes place. It seems pointless to me for economics to ignore geographical, institutional, social, cultural, or technological facts. Nor can it ignore the level of knowledge within society. As the sociologist Granovetter so aptly put it: an economy is embedded in a social setting from which it cannot escape. No amount of mathematical modeling can illuminate the relationships we call a market once we have stripped humans from those models. Society matters.

And value is so much more complicate a notion than the desiccated version we teach. It resides in the alleys and byways of interaction, and exchange is not reducible so easily to the lightweight and highly predictable concept crammed into the models found in orthodoxy.

So both to reconnect economics with reality, and to reinvigorate it in the aftermath of the crisis, we need an Artaudian interlude. We need a collective scream.

We need to rebel against the disregard of humanity, and all its endless convolutions, that sits at the heart of the modern orthodoxy. And we need to accept that the new economics may well be rougher around the edges. It may be less elegant. It may be less formal. It may be less appealing to all those searching for neat theorems. We need to toss those requirements overboard. They bought us little but a complacency now exposed as ridiculous by the very events the orthodox edifice is supposed to illuminate. It just won’t do anymore.

And if we all step away from those requirements we may just find that the new economics, for all its messiness and hopeless entanglement with reality, may well be more accurate. Not precise. Accurate. Useful rather than internally consistent. Practical rather than intellectually teasing. Interpretative rather than performative. Just better.

Artaud would argue we need to break up the old in order to discover the new. I used to resist such a call in economics, but the extraordinary tenacity of orthodoxy tells me it is time to rebel. Or to go through our equivalent of a rebellion.

It is time for an economics of the absurd.