Clearly Friedman is enthusiastic about the global marketplace. I’ve been writing a bit about the marketplace here as well, in my discussion of Lanham’s Economics of Attention and even further back here in a post on professing. I’m not in the habit of linking to myself, but I’ll make this exception as I’m trying to develop a thread of thought here.

Both Friedman and Lanham oppose top-down, centrally-controlled (i.e. socialist) economies. Instead they support the notion of bottom-up marketplace economies. I don’t really want to get into this here, but there are three obvious things to remember:

• Bottom-up and top-down are clearly interwoven. Friedman has no problem with top-down corporate structures. I.e., it doesn’t bother him that a Bill Gates or Michael Dell controls his company as thoroughly as the leader of any socialist nation controls his/her country.
• Corporations seek to dominante the global market (or at least their area of it) as thoroughly as any socialist government dominates it’s geographically-bounded market. There’s no real difference here except corporations don’t even pretend to act in the interest of citizens.
• The traditional argument for laissez-faire economics predicates essentially separate national economies and markets which had the potential to be thoroughly controlled by a government. In a flat world those markets are global. No single government really has the power to control the market. Governments are just players in the economy along with the corporations, and many corporations are bigger than many governments.

But anyway, my point here is that within this context I get a better understanding the argument Lanham was trying to make about the value of rhetoric. Yes, learning to communicate globally and developing an global market ethos might go a long way toward saying things like, "yes we can make trillions selling oil but maybe it would be better to make a real emphasis on developing alternate energy sources and more fuel-efficient machines." The market doesn’t seem to have a way to really say this; corporations discourses are too limited in their conception to take this action. Ethics is ultimately the ability to say it is better to die than to pursue a course of action. If Friedman and Lanham are to get their way and we are to pursue a more open, market-driven culture, then corporations will need to learn a more ethical discourse.

On the flip side, I’m not sure what is gained by simply opposing ethical behavior to corporate behavior. If we cannot imagine a way corporations can act ethically in a marketplace then we are in trouble. Ethics isn’t about eliminating the market; ethics is a way of understanding how we want markets and participants in a market to behave.

While rhetoric and ethics are marketplace practices, writing both within and without the market. As Derrida teaches us about writing’s relationship to philosophy, we may make a similar observation about writing and the marketplace. Writing may be conceived as labor and property; writing may be commodified and used for transactional purposes. However, I would argue that the production of writing, the emergence of thought through a compositional event, exists beyond the ken of the market. The market becomes a way of exchanging the products of such composition, as well as the material contexts that make them possible.

So perhaps the ethos of the market relies on creating a market discourse that sees the market as more than an end in itself, as something that is part of a larger whole.

Of course it does. What else would ethics be except a recognition of interdependence?

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