The market is an inescapable belief-structure one cannot step outside

Evidence

What current developments in neopragmatist theory suggest is that the “market” bears the same relationship to individual subjects, with their desires and their commodity lust, as the charged term belief to the conscious, “theoretical” attempts (sometimes designated as “knowledge”) to step outside that, to theorize or even to change it. Belief is here the missing totalization, the other term you can never get out of, some ultimate and definitive form of ideology fixed for all time (or what Sartre called the “originary choice of being”): “the only relevant truth about belief is that you can’t go outside it, and, far from being unlivable, this is a truth you can’t help but live. It has no practical consequences not because it can never be united with practice but because it can never be separated from practice” (AT29). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 483

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson equates ‘the market’ with ‘belief’ as an inescapable totalization — a helpful definition of how he wants us to understand market logic, useful for the reader’s cognitive map of their own position in the world system.
• DEEPTHINKING: The recursion here — we name ‘the market’ and thereby think we escape belief, but the naming itself is produced by the system — is the kind of dense knot the reader’s own thinking about situatedness needs.
• XREF: connects to: Judging whether markets conform to a model is itself a contested process. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 114; Market beliefs about a fund’s portfolio can be wrong yet still drive fire-sale pricing. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1061; Markets are human creations amenable to redesign, not natural forces — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 1237 (+1 more)