Rating Performativity

Abstract

The notion of the ‘market economy’ as a pregiven, ontological totality is increasingly being called into question. Its status as an autonomous reality separate from politics or society, with its own distinct laws and causal dynamics, is being disturbed by a burgeoning critical scholarship (Callon 1998; Knorr Cetina and Preda 2005; Langley 2008a; MacKenzie 2006), which ‘suggests that processes of knowledge and interpretation do not exist in addition to, or of secondary importance to, “real” material financial structures, but are precisely the way in which “finance” materializes’ (de Goede 2005: 7; original italics). It is this mutual constitution between the discursive and practical which is at the heart of the social studies of finance analysis of ‘performativity’. Rather than a unified category or natural phenomenon, which needs only to be unearthed with the appropriate methods, the market economy is constantly being constructed and regenerated through a multiplicity of discursive processes; each with their own particular effects on the configuration of its composition. There is no intrinsically ‘optimal’ position from which to deviate or use as an ultimate benchmark for the organization of economic activity.