Performativity of Economics

Silicon alleys, hills, peaks, beaches, savannahs, islands, lagoons and gulfs have mushroomed across cities of all continents, in the hope of fuelling profitable, innovative startup hubs. These Silicon-Valley replicas deploy economic theories, managerial fads, success stories and best practices that are metonymically linked to Northern California, but they also draw upon local arrangements of heterogeneous constituents: policy experts, entrepreneurs, reports, IT infrastructures, universities, coworking spaces, networking protocols, and so forth.
The making of one such ecosystem, Cape Town’s so-called silicon cape, is the topic of this paper, which, however, does not try to uncover the specific economic and geographic factors of tech clustering. Rather, it addresses some of the narrative discourses that have framed Cape Town as the entrepreneurial capital of South Africa and Africa at large. It shows how these narrative praxes are both reflexive and ontological: they at once work as metatheories of entrepreneurial innovation in an African city and lay the groundwork for its very possibility.
Via an ethnographic engagement of these textual discourses in the making, this article charts the uneasy relationship between technocapitalism and economic development in a city scarred by its colonial past and its racialized inequalities. In doing so, it shows how the discursive making of the silicon cape of Africa mobilized multiple economic sentiments, weaving together the search for profitable technology-based economies and the demand for social justice in a city of the Global South.

Focusing on the efforts of Nairobi’s water utility to reduce leakage in the city’s expansion of water infrastructure, this study offers an organizational assemblage perspective on infrastructure. Drawing on the concept of assemblage and its uptake in science and technology studies and cultural anthropology, infrastructure is the material form of emergent systems through which the flow of nature, goods, ideas, people and finance is organized over space and time. Nairobi’s water infrastructure brings together a diverse set of features, including pipes, meters, GPS technologies, smartphones, engineering reports, Excel spreadsheets, landlords, plumbers, African chiefs, thieves, foreign experts, politicians, accountants, engineers, the everyday lives and ethnicities of the people of Nairobi, climate conditions, hydraulics, urban topographies and the fluids sludge and water.
Based on a thick performative description of three praxiographic studies, condensed from a four-year ethnographic case study that included eight months of onsite fieldwork in Nairobi, I describe the engagement of Nairobi’s water utility in three technoscientific practices of water leakage and loss management: measuring, tracking, and demarcating water flow and leakage. Through a creative non-fictional writing process, including ficto-critical storytelling, inspired by a postcolonial and feminist understanding in science and technology studies, I empirically and politically account for how a technoscientific intervention enacts the pacification, visibility, and formalization of infrastructure.
My practical ontology framework helps me to understand how the organizing of infrastructure enacts the recursive dynamic of ontological multiplicity and stabilizing, a key concern in assemblage thinking and actor-network-theory. This dynamic is not only experimental, but entangled in organizing practices of governing fluidity, managing invisibility, and operating messiness. I also give the uptake of the concept of assemblage thinking in the turn to infrastructure in social theory empirical depth. This study suggests an empirical and conceptual way forward for organizational research to deploy infrastructure thinking.

Enacting Environments is an ethnography of the midst of the encounter between corporations, sustainable development and climate change. At this intersection 'environmental management' and 'carbon accounting' are put into practice. Purportedly, these practices green capitalism. Drawing on fieldwork of day-to-day practices of corporate environmental accountants and managers, Ingmar Lippert reconstructs their work as achieving to produce a reality of environment that is simultaneously stable and flexible enough for a particular corporate project: to stage the company, and in consequence capitalism, as in control over its relations to an antecedent environment. Not confined to mere texts or meetings between shiny stakeholders co-governing the corporation – among them some of the world's biggest auditing firms, an environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) and standards – control is found to be distributed across as well as limited to a myriad of practical work situations, involving spreadsheets and slide shows. Carbon accounting takes place in the midst of docile as well as dissident humans and nonhumans. As a result of this analysis, Enacting Environments establishes how carbon emission facts are produced and co-configure climate change realities. Ingmar Lippert argues: within capitalism, environment does not exist in the singular but in the plural; and these environments are not existing out there to be read off some anterior Nature but they are brought into social, economic and political existence in the practices of accounting for them. Providing a portfolio of methods to study techno-managerial engagement with carbon, Ingmar Lippert shows how much is overlooked in received theories of corporate environmental accounting, theories of the performativity of environmental economics and, ultimately, the epistemic and ontic effects of fact-making in the heart of neoliberal capitalism.

cite as: Ingmar Lippert (2013). Enacting Environments: An Ethnography of the Digitalisation and Naturalisation of Emissions. PhD Dissertation in Sociology, University of Augsburg, Augsburg.

In a decisive episode of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained a former slave, Django Freeman, and his patron Dr. Schultz finally manage to buy Broomhilda, Django’s wife, and thus to free her from the bloody hands of the Mississippi slave owner Calvin Candie. But after signing the contract Calvin insists, unexpectedly, that the partners shake hands, otherwise the contract, according to the local norm, is invalid. Dr. Schultz is unable to make this final move: the symbolic validation constitutive of the contract means, for him, taking sides with the monster. This costs him his life: the slaughter ensues – triggered by specific performativity at play.
The concept of performativity – of making something happen and exist by introducing it discursively or symbolically, through a new theoretical frame or a gesture, into the world – has become very influential in the recent decades and, after several seminal studies (see especially MacKenzie, 2006), has opened a new chapter in the philosophy of economics. In his new book, Nicolas Brisset claims that performativity has become a catch-all word, a result of ‘conceptual hijacking’ (p. 262), and sets out to clarify, criticize and reinstate the theory of performativity – that is, in my reading, the theory explaining how our knowledge matters for its very object and exploring the consequences of this mattering.

This article addresses some recent tendencies in economic methodology defined as a philosophy
of science for economics. I review the problem of normative/positive distinction in
methodology and argue that normativity in its past forms is intolerable today but is, at the
same time, indispensable for methodological inquiry. Using recent texts by Mirowski and
Nik-Khah and by Alexandrova and Northcott on the applications of auction theory as a
case study, I compare in more detail various approaches to economic methodology inspired
by the science and technology studies (STS) and philosophy of science literatures, respectively.
On the basis of this comparison, I show that the STS programme in economic methodology
may prove fruitful in the future, but there is still a place for more aprioristic
philosophical thinking. Methodology and history of economics also play a fundamental
role that goes beyond the descriptive analysis of STS and offer conceptual clarification
paired with normative concerns provided by philosophers of science.

In Cape Town, as in other cities of the Global South, the paradigms of millennial development are continuously mobilised in specific material ways. The idea that poverty can be fought with profit is manifest in a series of urban experiments that involve informal entrepreneurs, corporations, real estate developers, local architects, economists, NGOs, and state agencies, in the search for market solutions to economic marginality.
To illustrate this argument about the spatial politics of development, this paper charts the architectural, organizational and pedagogical making of Philippi Village, a building complex in one of Cape Town’s poorest neighbourhoods. A former cement factory turned into an entrepreneurial hub, Philippi Village is a material inscription, at the so-called bottom of the pyramid, of the possibility of expanding the frontiers of accumulation.
However, whilst this entrepreneurial village may be a brownfield site for new forms of profit, its architectures also reveal the diverse economic rationalities that emerge from the quest of good entrepreneurship, including the politics of seeking spatial justice amidst the urban legacies of apartheid

Autour des années 1980, la recomposition de la prévision économique se manifeste tant dans les institutions en charge de dire l’avenir économique qu’à travers l’ethos professionnel des économistes. Dans les considérations de ces derniers, centrées jusqu’à cette époque sur l’intervention de l’État, la question des effets des énoncés prédictifs est absente. Cette culture descriptive et réaliste, qui implique une séparation entre l’existence des phénomènes et leur mesure, accorde progressivement une place aux effets de boucle et privilégie une approche microéconomique de court terme. Cette période nous permet ainsi de styliser deux conceptions de l’économie et des manières de contenir les inquiétudes sur l’avenir.

Originally proposed by philosopher of language John Austin, and later adapted by other social sciences, the performativity thesis has been known as a critique of the homo economicus of mainstream economics. The performativity of economics is the idea that economics gives birth to activities and markets in the economy (rather than merely describe or interpret them). This paper reviews arguments for and against performativity as a useful way of thinking about the economics-economy relationship. Following this survey, we put forward our interpretation, viz., an interactive approach to this subject. By doing so, we argue for its epistemological relevance for economic methodology, i.e., for understanding the relationship between theories and economic models and the events in the economy. Furthermore, we claim that because they are embedded in social reality, mainstream economic theories occupy a particularly resilient position.

Comment se constitue, se consolide et se déploie une certaine réalité économique ? Cet article étudie la question à travers la situation du Commissariat général au Plan à la fin des années 1960. Si celui-ci occupe alors une place importante dans l’espace politico-administratif, il fait toutefois l’objet de nombreuses remises en cause, en raison particulièrement de la force alors accordée au marché et à la concurrence extérieure. L’introduction dans ce cadre d’un modèle macroéconomique dénommé « FIFI », élaboré par une équipe d’économistes de l’INSEE, s’accompagne de certains déplacements quant au mode de fabrication des politiques économiques et de leurs finalités. Il a ainsi été conçu de manière à dresser un tableau de l’économie française en 1975 si aucune décision n’était prise, afin d’identifier les problèmes économiques à venir et de déterminer les solutions pouvant être proposées. En ce qu’il est un instrument d’attribution de causalités (entre différentes entités telles que le salaire, le chômage ou encore la contrainte extérieure), le modèle FIFI tend à déplacer le type d’imputations sur lesquelles s’appuient les participants au Plan, et notamment les organisations syndicales. Ainsi, ces métrologies économiques n’ont pas pour seule conséquence de faire une réalité chiffrée et relativement autonome ; elles déstabilisent également d’autres formes politiques, celles-ci explicitement fondées sur des valeurs.

(forthcoming, 2016) in Journal of Cultural Economy

Marc Bauder’s finance film, Master of the Universe (2013) won the European Documentary Film Prize in December 2014. Bauder’s film focuses on a series on interviews with a former leading investment banker, Rainer Voss, high up in one of Frankfurt’s deserted bank skyscrapers. Voss’s statements, set against the skyline of Frankfurt’s ‘Mainhattan’ financial sector, allow Bauder to constitute an aesthetic that, I argue, successfully addresses a key problem in moving image studies, namely how to find an appropriate film form to register the workings of contemporary finance. Bauder’s film offers an unusual depiction of the self-constitution and self-understanding of a banker-turned-whistle-blower, focusing on Voss’s speech acts of explication and justification. Drawing on Judith Butler’s analysis of performative agency and of the separation of economics and politics through iterative perlocutionary acts, I argue that Bauder’s investigation into the performativity that establishes the autonomy of the financial sector and grants it extensive social power offers a significant aesthetic engagement with financial performativity and contributes to debates about documentary and performativity and about routes to a reconnection of economics and politics.

Originally proposed by philosopher of language John Austin, and later adapted by other social sciences, the performativity thesis has been known as a critique of the homo economicus of mainstream economics. The performativity of economics is the idea that economics gives birth to activities and markets in the economy (rather than merely describe or interpret them). This paper reviews arguments for and against performativity as a useful way of thinking about the economics-economy relationship. Following this survey, we put forward our interpretation, viz., an interactive approach to this subject. By doing so, we argue for its epistemological relevance for economic methodology, i.e., for understanding the relationship between theories and economic models and the events in the economy. Furthermore, we claim that because they are embedded in social reality, mainstream economic theories occupy a particularly resilient position.

Originally proposed by philosopher of language John Austin, and later adapted by other social sciences, the performativity thesis has been known as a critique of the homo economicus of mainstream economics. The performativity of economics is the idea that economics gives birth to activities and markets in the economy (rather than merely describe or interpret them). This paper reviews arguments for and against performativity as a useful way of thinking about the economics-economy relationship. Following this survey, we put forward our interpretation, viz., an interactive approach to this subject. By doing so, we argue for its epistemological relevance for economic methodology, i.e., for understanding the relationship between theories and economic models and the events in the economy. Furthermore, we claim that because they are embedded in social reality, mainstream economic theories occupy a particularly resilient position.

Abstract: This paper surveys the 'performativity of economics' thesis and uses it as an argument on the influence economics models may have on the economy. Although the performativity thesis has been target of important critiques – it is even called 'vogue' or 'trendy' theory sometimes – its weak version simply claims that theoretical entities can have effects on economic agents' practices. If this weak version is admitted, it is worth to discuss the reasons why economists adopt formal models, though its obvious unrealisticness. We find one of these reasons in the institutions of economics and its processes of epistemic legitimation. By assuming that such a choice may lock economists in a 'bad equilibrium' regarding its aim of understanding and acting in the economy, this paper argues for greater ontological awareness about model building and using.