Michael Brown’s article “Ideology and the Metaphysics of Content” (SOCIAL TEXT 8, 1983) reminds us of what was at stake in the transition from ideology critique to cultural studies. Through an ethnomethodological close reading of the opening part of Marx’s Capital, Brown teaches us that this text is educative before it is didactic and that its meaning is historical and available only in the encounter with the reader, an encounter that produces both reader and text. There is no room here for a correct content independent of reading in history. Brown’s example is used to stage an encounter in teaching, in a British business school, between undergraduate students and reports of the current financial crisis, approaching the crisis phenomenologically. The article concludes with a discussion of mutual promises and possession in the world of finance.
