![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In this article, I consider how descriptions of finance since the 2007–2008 credit crisis have offered a new template of representation for value and its changing valences, both theoretical and aesthetic. My particular concern is social scientific writing about the crisis that might be grouped loosely under the rubric of ‘performativity’, namely the argument that models (or representations, either mathematic or linguistic) produce markets, and that markets are best studied through ethnographic observation. I ask why language, performance and metaphor itself – what was once the province of a more literary tradition – have become a methodological tool for social scientists now in their particular investigations of finance. I suggest that a more complete analysis of finance may be located if economic performativity and aesthetic theories of performance are brought into dialogue. In part one, I read the ethnographic work of Donald MacKenzie, most centrally, as well as that of Janet Roitman, both of whom have isolated some literary problem of the economy: performativity and narrative, respectively. In the second section, I look at a series of artists and theorists of performance who might be understood to offer a critique of the relationship between language, money and performativity.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Full information available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1764183/?ref_=ttmd_ql. Accessed March 3, 2014.
2. Boesky includes in his book the etymology of the word, from the German arbeit, ‘to work’.
3. A plot construction that gives it a certain intertextual resonance with Tom Wolfe's 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities.
6. A quick and easy definition:
Arbitrage in this sense refers to the efficient marketeers’ assumption that should prices get out of line with their warranted value, rational investors will move in quickly and buy underpriced assets or sell overpriced ones. Thus mispricing can only be transient, never sustained. This makes sense if you’ re dealing with two very similar assets; were gold is selling for $350 an ounce in New York and $355 in London, then speculators would immediately move in and buy New York.
7. This brings into question the intersection of my claims with those of anti-representational theory. See for example: ‘non-representational theory runs along with other turns towards performance and performativity which may be found occurring more or less contemporaneously across geography, the social sciences and humanities’. From the helpful introduction to Taking Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography, (2010, p. 37).
8. For a basic bibliography of performativity, see Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, Lucia Siu (2007); Donald Mackenzie (Citation2006).
9. Michel Callon (Citation1998, 30) states that ‘economics, in the broad sense of the term, performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions’ (1998, 2). One might contrast this to an older description of the aims of ethnographic observation from Clifford Geertz who suggests, ‘the thing to ask about a burlesqued wink or a mock sheep raid is not what their ontological status is. It is the same as that of rocks on the one hand and dreams on the other – they are things of this world. The thing to ask is what their import is’. Clifford Geertz, ‘Thick Description,’ http://people.ucsc.edu/~ktellez/geertz1973.pdf (no pagination).
10. This is a big claim with a long theoretical history. For one interesting genealogical summary and critique, see Charles Sumner (Citation2012) Lesjak, Carolyn (2013). For literary scholars, I might position ‘performativity’ as the new historicism of economic anthropology, see the introduction to Stephen Greenblatt, Catherine Gallagher (2000).
11. This tradition of literary performativity is particular a queer one. See for example Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Queer Performativity: Henry James's (Citation1993). Judith Butler, progenitor of so much queer performance theory will be considered as well.
12. There is now an emergent field that we might call ‘literary studies of finance’ to complement ‘social studies of finance’. This includes scholars such as Mary Poovey, Joshua Clover, Anna Kornbluh, Annie McClanahan, and Alison Shonkwiler. My work too participates in this conversation. By in large, however, these two fields are not in the kind of dialogue I believe they could be. This claim I return to at the end of my essay.
13. For two very basic definitions to support this claim, see Greta R. Krippner (Citation2005). Krippner claims that ‘finance refers to demarcations of manifest, structured time and that its operations refer to activities relating to the provision (or transfer) of liquid capital in expectation of future interest, dividends, or capital gains’. See also the work Robert Guttman, who claims that the temporal possibilities of financial practices are used to bridge ‘the real temporal disjuncture between intention, production and consumption’ and make the credit-based ‘time aspect crucial to economic activity’. (1994).
14. In literary scholarship, the tendency of positioning finance as a code or appearance, as ‘exchange’ in a new historical parlance, is now beginning to change. See for example the recent issue of Representations, Vol. 126, No. 1, Spring 2014 on ‘Financialization and the Culture Industry,’ which offers a range of possibilities for how to produce a ‘literary studies of finance.’
15. Karen Ho notes that anthropology has long ‘culturized’ the economy; by my concern here is more specific than culture per se. (2009).
16. I mean this in the sense that Mary Poovey presents in Genres of the Credit Economy (2008); the economy can also be read as a text with distinguishing and regulating and regularizing tropes.
18. See Caitlin Zaloom (Citation2006); Karen Ho (Citation2009).
19. Alex Preda (Citation2007).
20. Karl Marx (Citation1981).
21. Donald MacKenzie (Citation2011).
22. ‘Knowledge Production in Financial Markets: Credit Default Swaps, the ABX, and the Subprime Crisis’ p 3. ; available on MacKenzie's website, no full citation given.
23. MacKenzie describes his methodology: ‘The interviews took a broadly oral-history form, in which interviewees were led through their careers in relation to the instruments in question, with a particular focus on understanding the main developments in those markets, how trading was and is conducted, and the role of knowledge-generating processes’.
24. Caitlin Zaloom (Citation2006).
25. Karen Ho (Citation2009).
26. Buenza, D., & Stark, D. (2004).
27. My initial concern, then, is not identical to the reason that Randy Martin calls these tautological, however. ‘If [quantitative models used to manage risk] worked in measuring outcomes of events so that actions could be taken or prices assigned, then the laws of the markets were being upheld and the models must be working. This tautology … has come to be called performativity by those who study the effects of economists’ discursive and mathematical representations’. ‘A Derivative Sociality,’ Randy Martin (Citation2012).
28. Perry Mehrling (Citation2010).
29. Perry Mehrling (Citation2010, p. xii)
30. It is that disappearance that distinguishes metaphor from simile. A metaphor proceeds: ‘Stan is a tool-maker’, while a simile would be ‘Stan is like a tool-maker’.
31. In one critique of these rules, the authors wonder something very similar to MacKenzie's performativity thesis: ‘The key to the debate is whether fair value accounting injects excessive volatility into transactions prices – i.e. whether marking to market leads to the emergence of an additional, endogenous source of volatility that is purely a consequence of the accounting norm, rather than something that reflects the underlying fundamentals. Real decisions are then distorted due to the measurement regime’. ‘Marking to Market?’ Guillaume Plantin, et al. Electronic copy available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1186362.
32. See Philip Mirowksi's excellent critique of the relationship of between ‘social studies of finance’ and STS in his co-authored chapter with Edward Nik-Khah, ‘Markets Made Flesh: Performativity and a Problem in Science Studies Augmented with Consideration of the FCC Auctions” in Perry Mehrling (Citation2010, p. xii).
33. For a critique of presentism in ethnography, see, most recently, Sarah Sharman's (Citation2014).
34. Louis Althusser (Citation2002).
35. MacKenzie, “Unlocking the Language of Mortgage Backed Securities”.
36. Appropriately, Judith Butler herself has joined this conversation and engaged this notion of economic performativity. See Butler, Judith (2010).
37. Janet Roitman (Citation2013), chapter 2, ‘Crisis Narratives’ especially. p. 38, 56, 83, respectively.
38. Janet Roitman (Citation2013, p. 45).
39. See Mary Poovey (Citation1998).
40. Mary Poovey (Citation1998, p. 12).
41. One is reminded of Fredric Jameson's (Citation1981) suggestion that ‘narrative is the central instance or function’ of the human mind in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act.
42. Franco Moretti (1988) has consistently suggested that this is the key stylistic and narrative aesthetic invention of modernity. See, for example, The Way of the World.
43. Perry Mehrling (Citation2010, p. xii).
44. Indeed, there is a long tradition of figuring money, as opposed to finance, as a narrative device. See, for example, Marc Shell's (Citation1982).
45. See Joshua Clover, Ret-Con, in Representations, op. cit. Clover has encouraged us to think of poetry not narrative fiction as the proper heuristic for criticizing finance because poetry is non-narrative.
46. See http://techne.buffalo.edu/programs/colloquium.shtml; http://updates.caitlinberrigan.com/2014/lessons-in-capitalism-final-performance-at-harvard-carpenter-center-for-the-arts/; and http://gdouglasbarrett.com/, respectively.
47. ‘Money with a guaranteed rate of return’ is how Dick Bryan, Randy Martin and Mike Rafferty define finance and consequently explain the difference between finance and money. Dick Bryan, Randy Martin, and Mike Rafferty (2009).
48. Peggy Phelan (Citation1998).
49. MacKenzie (Citation2011 p. 17).
50. Economy of Words, pp. 5–6.
51. MacKenzie (Citation2011, pp. 11, 14).
52. Images and text courtesy of the artist.
53. http://gdouglasbarrett.com. I have written elsewhere about the very important discourse of complexity. It is certainly operative in every text and object I have discussed in this article, but I do not have the space to address it specifically here. For my article on this specific topic, see Leigh Claire La Berge (Citation2015). But also to compare to finance-focused ethnography that is not oriented around a central trope of complexity, see Kaushik Sunder Rajan's (Citation2007).
54. MacKenzie describes how, as the crisis progressed, it became more difficult to speak with financiers, and he frequently had to seek the intermediary of firms’ legal departments, sometimes to the extent of having them present during interviews. Yet he often succeeded.
55. Kaushik Sunder Rajan (Citation2007).
56. MacKenzie, Ho, Zaloom, Holmes and Roitman, these scholars are not in conversation with literary studies. Mary Poovey may be the signal exception as her work is known throughout social studies of finance, yet she is not cited in MacKenzie's work, or Ho's. And her work on finance and credit is not cited in Holmes’s. Meanwhile, literary scholars consistently cite social scientists. At conferences, too, I regularly hear literary scholars citing social scientists, but I have not seen such reciprocity at the social studies of finance conferences I have attended.
57. See Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty (2013).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Leigh Claire La Berge
Leigh Claire La Berge (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Canada.