Performative global finance: bridging micro and macro approaches with a stratified perspective

Abstract

Theories of performativity can enhance the study of global finance. Taking everyday financial practices seriously, they emphasise the potentially structuring effects and disciplinary nature of finance, and foreground the performative role of economics, financial models, and formulas. It has remained largely overlooked to date that the literature on the performativity of finance can be divided into two distinct approaches. ‘Microperformativity’ is the more actor-oriented approach, beginning its analysis with the exploration of agencements and their practices, or the examination of the social history of mathematical formulas in finance. ‘Macroperformativity’, in contrast, takes its point of departure from the social structure of finance itself, often in relation to national, international, or global power structures. Neither approach provides for an intermediary concept that more explicitly links the micro and macro level. Nor does either approach give adequate analytical consideration to social conflicts and power struggles. To fill these gaps, the paper applies poststructural hegemony theory to reconceptualise performativity as an articulatory logic which accounts for the transition of a particularity towards a universality within a framework of stratified hegemony. Framed accordingly, the concept of performativity accounts more strongly for the social and political processes, ruptures, contestations and contradictions in global finance.

KEYWORDS:

• Performativity
• hegemony
• global finance
• political struggles
• global political economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Joscha Wullweber is an assistant professor in political science at the Department of Globalisation and Politics in Kassel, Germany. His recent publications include Wullweber, J. (2015), ‘Post-Positivist Political Theory’, in Gibbons, M.T. (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell; Wullweber, J. (2015), ‘Global Politics and Empty Signifiers: The political construction of high-technology’, Critical Policy Studies, 9 (1), pp. 78–96.; Wullweber, J. (2014), The question is which is to be master – that's all! Amerikanische Internationale Politische Ökonomie vs. britische Internationale Politische Ökonomie!? Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, 21 (2), pp. 63–84.

Notes

1. I have very much benefitted from discussions with and comments from Nina Boy, Marieke de Goede, Mareille Kaufmann, Andreas Langenohl, Paul Langley, Donald MacKenzie, John H. Morris, Carsten Ochs, Loren Samlowski, Timo Walter, Benjamin Wilhelm, and the two anonymous reviewers.

2. The performativity approach can be subsumed under the reflexive turn in the social sciences (Hamati-Ataya 2013). However, the concept of performativity is more specific than the term reflexivity. Moreover, it has already shown an impact on the disciplines of IR and especially IPE, although its overall potential is still underestimated (Helleiner 2011, see already Campbell 1992, 1998).

3. The expectations of market actors are crucial in shaping the market, as Keynes has already observed: ‘A monetary economy [ … ] is essentially one in which changing views about the future are capable of influencing the quantity of employment and not merely its direction’ (Keynes 1973 [1936]: 2).

4. Borrowing this term von Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Callon uses it to designate the relationship between statements and their worlds, which he calls sociotechnical agencements. By using this term, Callon seeks to avoid the impression that a divide exists between acting humans and non-acting things. His intention is rather to convey that humans, non-humans, and dead matter are endowed with the possibility of acting (Callon 2005: 4).

5. It is also true for actor-network theory, see Latour (1987).

6. Austin distinguishes between illocutionary and perlocutionary performative acts: While illocutionary acts directly produce a new reality, the effect of perlocutionary acts only occurs when certain conditions are in place:

[T]he former are speech acts that, in saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying; the latter are speech acts that produce certain effects as their consequence [ … ] The illocutionary speech act is itself the deed that it effects; the perlocutionary merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act itself. (Butler 1997: 3)

7. Clarke (2012: 265) criticises a lack of clarity of this approach. This argument, however, somehow misses the point: A social structure rarely has straightforward and directly observable effects with a cause-effect-chain. This is particularly true for postpositivist approaches which problematise a clear-cut separation between agency and structure.

8. See in more detail Wullweber (2010).

9. Another requirement for such an operation of closure is the construction of an antagonism (Wullweber 2015a: 81).

10. Strategic articulations are modes of organizing reality that are usually not guided centrally. Furthermore, to analyse strategies does not mean that we have to know the intentions of actors: ‘[W]e find only different subjects whose activities are more or less coordinated, whose activities meet more or less resistance from other forces, and whose strategies are pursued within a structural context that is both constraining and facilitating’ (Jessop and Sum 2006: 312–13).

11. Methodologically, the identification and definition of social layers is, of course, not an easy task (Wæver 2005: 38–9).

12. Later, in 2013 it was discovered that there were serious arithmetic flaws in the study and that no correlations exist between the growth rate and government debts. In general, the way in which correlation had been modelled is crucial to understanding the financial crisis (MacKenzie 2011, MacKenzie and Spears 2014a, 2014b). These developments in financial economics, in turn, are embedded within a general thrust to ‘calculate, diversify, price and exchange all manner of future economic uncertainties as “risks”’ (Langley 2010: 75).

13. The ECBs sovereign debt-buying plan (quantitative easing) and the so-called ‘Investment Plan for Europe’ (European Commission 2014) are concessions to more Keynesian demands in this respect.

14. One important reason for the eurozone crisis and for the global financial crisis was the urge for profit, of course. This driving force that – not as a natural given, but as a discursively constructed, strengthened, and carefully protected horizon of truth within the economic sphere – is deeply embedded and sedimented within private-profit oriented market based economies. This drive for profit constantly bears new processes of commodification, and searches for and produces innovative financial asset streams and products (Leyshon and Thrift 2007, Aitken 2011: 125–31).

15. I am grateful to Carsten Ochs for this argument.