Metastasis and retroactive causality in incentive rhetoric |
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| Authors: | Robert Olen McDonald |
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| Institution: | Department of Communication Studies, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, USA |
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| Abstract: | Our contemporary moment is characterized by the pervasiveness of economics in social life, and the extension of “incentives” into new areas represents this movement’s keystone. Originally a fairly narrow term from neoclassical economic theory, politicians, journalists, and cultural ?gures deploy “incentives” to explain all manner of activity: judicial rulings, gendered wage gaps, and even whether soccer players score penalty kicks. To address this, I elucidate the trope of metastasis – the rhetorical mechanism by which social life is “economized.” Metastasis entails a ?gurative displacement, wherein cause shifts from one place to another. More than simply a spread of narrow economic ideas into culture, incentive rhetoric metastasizes. It displaces alternative explanations onto neoclassical market axioms. Since its proponents insist that incentives are causal mechanisms, I introduce Jacques Lacan’s interpretation of Aristotle’s discourse on causality. Lacan rereads Aristotle’s “?nal cause” from a rhetorical perspective, and forwards the retroactive causality of the symbolic order. Incentive rhetoric exempli?es this concept, in which all outcomes are explained as having been caused by a prior, unseen market force. Incentive rhetorics promise a universal code that unlocks the mysteries of human behavior that reduces all context to discrete individual choices, thereby providing a discursive alibi for economic inequality. |
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| Keywords: | Psychoanalysis rhetoric of economics inequality rhetoric of trope economic culture |
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