Counter-Performativity Bashing

Yuval Millo patiently rises to the defense of performativity:

1.  Yes, it’s just like ‘self-fulfilling prophesy’ but he and Mackenzie “show in detail how self-fulfilling prophecy comes about, how it becomes institutionalized, under what conditions it is ‘reversed’ and we expose the crucial role that non-human actors play in the process.”

2. The accusation that researchers ‘go native’ to understand the performativity of a theory misses the point.  The strongest STS and SSK works “strive to understand the techno-scientific knowledge embedded in the machines/devices studied and, critically, they identify and analyze the reflections of the larger political, social and cultural circumstances where these technologies were developed … by understanding the minute details of, say, how credit derivates are designed sheds new light on the macro conditions of neo-liberalism and gain better understanding of the crash.”

3. Finally, he elaborates a point made initially by ANT scholars in the 80s: “the fact that economic theory is being ‘made accurate’ does not mean that the theory or ‘economics’ operated so that this aim is achieved. Instead, performativity is the result (which is frequently unintended) of hybrid networks of actors who operate so as to promote a variety of agendas (scientific, political, commercial, etc.).”  In other words, simple epistemologies really don’t cut the mustard because they obscure how technologies - human and nonhuman assemblages - are tamed 

“…what if we were to treat prices as artifacts? Not simply as artifacts of the market mechanism, but as technological artifacts, brought about by men and women working together to make prices a real thing? What if we shifted our analytical focus from the meaning (social, symbolic, cultural) of prices to the technologies, which sustain the price system? And what if we analyzed these technologies for what they stand for –e.g. what is the price system supposed to achieve? What makes it legitimate or acceptable? (Muniesa 2000)…Treating prices not as things, but as technologies, brings us back to a point first raised, perhaps, by Karl Polanyi (1944) in his critique of nineteenth century market society but powerfully extended by Callon (e.g., 1998, 2007) in his analysis of the “embeddedness of economic markets in economics.” The real power of economics, Callon argues, is ontological –it is the power to “economicize” the material world through the imposition of a legitimate language and the proliferation of “calculative agencies.” Economics produces (performs) a world (an economy) in which calculability is a key cultural competence, thereby reinforcing the applicability and performative power of economics itself. Furthermore, this back-and-forth movement between economy and economics is itself constitutive of the stable economic objects that we call “markets” or “prices”.”

— Fourcade, M (forthcoming) Price and Prejudice: On Economics and the Enchantment / Disenchantment of Nature.  p.4