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Todd Suomela's Library tagged performativity   View Popular, Search in Google

Feb
12
2012

"I could, of course, put this more crudely. Economics is performative when it serves the interest of the powerful, and not performative when it doesn’t. In this sense, the problem is not with economics, but with a class structure that causes the “real world” to be a corrupted and perverted form of a market economy."

economics performativity power markets ideology class risk

  • If economics were always per formative, you would therefore expect there to be at least widespread markets in major contingencies.

     

    And there are not. There’s a market for my labour (I hope), but not a market for my labour, contingent upon there being a great depression. Although I can insure my house losing value because of fire, I cannot insure against it losing value because of a fall in demand for houses in Rutland. I can insure against inflation, thanks to index-linked gilts, but not against recession or inequality. As Robert Shiller pointed out in his wonderful books, Macro Markets and The New Financial Order, markets for coping with major economic risks are lamentably under-developed.

Dec
1
2011

"The “performativity thesis” is the claim that parts of contemporary economics and finance, when carried out into the world by professionals and popularizers, reformat and reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe, in ways that bring the world into line with theory. Practical technologies, calculative devices and portable algorithms give actors tools to implement particular models of action. I argue that social network analysis is performative in the same sense as the cases studied in this literature. Social network analysis and finance theory are similar in key aspects of their development and effects. For the case of economics, evidence for weaker versions of the performativity thesis in quite good, and the strong formulation is circumstantially supported. Network theory easily meets the evidential threshold for the weaker versions; I offer empirical examples that support the strong (or “Barnesian”) formulation. Whether these parallels are a mark in favor of the thesis or a strike against it is an open question. I argue that the social network technologies and models now being “performed” build out systems of generalized reciprocity, connectivity, and commons-based production. This is in contrast both to an earlier network imagery that emphasized self-interest and entrepreneurial exploitation of structural opportunities, and to the model of action typically considered to be performed by economic technologies."

network-analysis networks performativity metaphor research draft

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