Politics

In analysing the relation between politics and the economy, sociology tended to adopt a particular spatial metaphor.¹⁰ The economy is reckoned to be a more or less solid foundation on top of which rest political and ethical principles.

How does Gallon himself spatialise the relation between economics and politics? There are three elements to his account. First, in The Laws of the Markets, he notes how politics is generally placed outside of the frame of economic calculation. As Andrew Barry notes in his chapter, Gallon understands measurement and calculation generally to have anti-political effects. Calculation is intended to have, and often has, the effect of cooling the temperature of political debate. Seen in these terms, Gallon does indeed map the distinction between economics and politics onto the opposition between the internal and the external. Possible objects of political contention are placed outside the frame.

Yet along with this argument, Gallon advances a second one, which complexifies his position. This argument starts from the recognition that framing is always, in principle, contestable. Indeed, far from limiting the possibility for political conflict and negotiation, framing forms something like a surface on which forms of political reflection, negotiation and conflict can condense. No doubt, calculation effects a certain rationalisation of social and economic relations but the extent of this rationalisation should not be overestimated.

Why is this the case? One influential argument, suggested by Ulrich Beck, is that we live in a ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). In this account, the risks generated by the development of science and technology can no longer be addressed through scientific and technical means. Gallon’s analysis has some parallels with Beck’s in so far as he, like Beck, emphasises the reflexivity of social and economic life and the increasing prevalence of political disputes concerning the development of science and technology. However, arguing against Beck, he questions both the contemporary importance of risk, and Beck’s assumption that a clear demarcation can be made between the expertise of experts and that of ordinary citizens (Gallon et al. 2001: 310-13).

Although there is nothing new in the politicisation of markets, he argues that this politicisation has come to take new forms. On the one hand, the rise of the service economy, or what he terms the ‘economy of qualities’, leads to an increasing focus on the quality, qualification and re-qualification of products. Although some of the qualities of products may be quantifiable and measureable this does not mean that they are uncontestable. Indeed, the reverse is true. Actors may become increasingly reflexive and critical about how qualification occurs and what it implies. Gonsider, for example, the increasing consumer interest in the ways in which food quality is monitored and guaranteed, and the development of the notion of the ‘organic’ as a brand of quality and purity On the other hand, there is growing sense of the plurality of market forms and the need to open up the question of the particular form that markets take: “the organization of markets becomes a collective issue and the economy becomes (again) political” (ibid.).

The third dimension of Callon’s analysis of the relation between politics and markets develops from this historical argument, and is explicitly normative. Like Habermas, Callon’s normative position is a procedural one although, unlike Habermas, it does not revolve around an opposition between lifeworld and system, or between instrumental and communicative rationality On the contrary, in an analysis that draws some inspiration from ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, Callon seeks to level the difference between sociological expertise and everyday knowledge.¹² The kinds of questions generally posed by the sociologist are, Callon argues, also posed by actors themselves. In these circumstances, rather than take up the position of the ‘engaged intellectual’, the critical theorist or the scientist, he advocates a sociology that both recognises and follows the trajectories of the actors themselves (Callon 1999: 71; Rabeharisoa and Callon 1999: 3).

But which actors?¹³ This question is crucial for those concerned with the politics of economic sociology. In their earlier work the actor-network theorists’ analysis of politics as a Machiavellian process of intrigue and calculation was criticised for its identification with the position and strategies of the powerful (Star 1991; Lee and Brown 1994). In their most recent work, by contrast, Callon and his colleague Vololona Rabeharisoa have followed the work of those involved with a social movement organisation, the French muscular dystrophy association (AFM) (Rabeharisoa and Callon 1999; Callon and Rabeharisoa, 2003).¹⁴ Part of the interest of AFM is precisely its inventiveness in creating new relations between scientific researchers and laypersons, in raising the visibility of disabled bodies, in forging new identities and collectivities, and in using public media.

Strathern’s chapter presents two case studies - one of which is a particular form of hybrid forum - a Commission (in her case, the Canadian Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies). As a specific form of institution that is intended to inform action, a Commission relies on the existence of oppositions that are conventionally made between government and market and government and politics. The idea of a Commission relies on the idea that government is distinct from the government of the market economy (even though markets are, in part, constituted through legal regulation) and that government is distinct from politics (if politics is conceived of as disagreement). Commissions are the institutional form in which agreement can be reached without having to engage in what is normally called politics. They are ways of circumventing the messy ‘circumstances of politics’ which tend to be encountered in parliament or the mass media.¹⁵ Although this is not the central focus of her argument, Strathern’s chapter demonstrates how other (non­economic) experts may themselves come to dominate a hybrid forum.

Strathern’s chapter extends Callon’s notion of externality in three significant ways. First, she shows how the notion of externality can be applied to an act of socio-political framing (by a Commission). Second, she argues that in the case of industrial patents, the act of framing anticipates externalities that have an ethical aspect. Third, just as Callon conceives of economics as a set of practical techniques, Strathern conceives of ethics as a set of practical forms of moral reasoning. However, there is a crucial difference between ethics and the more calculative techniques associated with economics. Whereas economic calculation may involve the generation of a great deal of information, ethics derives from general principles that are understood by the ethicists themselves. For Strathern, ethics can be under­stood as a particular form of externality, an internal externality, which derived from the moral reasoning of the Commission itself: “They were not simply adding their own voice to the mix; they called down a justification for their views which lay within themselveS” (Strathern, this volume, our emphasis). In his work, Callon insists that economics must be understood as performative. The level of its abstraction from the world also serves to effect new relations in the world. The social sciences are, in his account, a productive enterprise. Likewise, Strathern suggests that we need to think of ethics in terms of its orientation to action despite its recourse to the abstractions of moral philosophy Action is always implied in the ethical norm, “yet action... does not belong to the discursive framing of the norm itself” (ibid.).

While Strathern’s chapter points to the need to rethink the anthropology of ethics, Barry’s chapter points to the anthropology of politics that is concerned with the technical practice of the political and the messiness of political circumstance. At one level, the chapter simply extends Callon’s approach from economics to politics. Following Callon, Barry is concerned with the question of framing and the ways in which the division between politics and economics is itself framed.Just as economic activity depends on a vast exercise in framing, so do forms of political activity such as voting or acting as a politician. Whereas many sociologists and anthropologists find politics (and ethics) everywhere, Barry argues that politics is a rather specialist, and located, activity The chapter revolves around two arguments. The first emphasises the importance of various forms of

‘anti-political’ activity that are oriented towards a reduction in the space of politics. The second argues that metrology and calculation can, in practice, have political rather than anti-political effects, shifting and opening up the space of politics, and establishing a conduit for the cross-contamination of the economic and the political.