cooper - pragmatics of money and finance beyond performativity

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Journal of Cultural Economy

ISSN: 1753-0350 (Print) 1753-0369 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjce20

Pragmatics of Money and Finance: BeyondPerformativity and Fundamental Value

Melinda Cooper & Martijn Konings

To cite this article: Melinda Cooper & Martijn Konings (2016) Pragmatics of Money andFinance: Beyond Performativity and Fundamental Value, Journal of Cultural Economy, 9:1, 1-4,DOI: 10.1080/17530350.2015.1117516

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2015.1117516

Published online: 29 Dec 2015.

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PRAGMATICS OF MONEY AND FINANCE:BEYOND PERFORMATIVITY ANDFUNDAMENTAL VALUE

Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings

(Received 4 November 2015; accepted 4 November 2015)

Contemporary approaches to nance as diverse as performativity theory and Marxist value-form theory have a tendency to lapse into a dogmatic structuralism that merely replicatesthe orthodoxies of nancial economics. These approaches are unable to account for thepossibility of either systemic failure or historical rupture in the organization of nancialmarkets. This introduction considers several possible ways of exiting this impasse andpresents an overview of the papers in this special issue.

KEYWORDS: money; nancialization; performativity; value theory

In the recent growth of social and cultural approaches to economic life, the notion of the performative has been front and centre. The problematic of performativity has beendeveloped as a critique of economistic essentialism and has typically emphasized theneed to understand economic phenomena in non-reductionist ways, as contingent assem-blages that acquire a degree of stability through processes of iterative association (Callon2008 ; Mackenzie 2008; Mackenzie et al. 2008). The performativity agenda has thus effecteda shift away from ontological questions about the nature of institutions or the value of iden-tities towards the practical constructive effects of cognitive devices, affective af liationsand discursive techniques. Although this research programme has been highly successfuland productive, as the notion of performativity has found wider application in thinkingabout the nature of economy, it has tended to accrue exactly the kind of essentialistvalences and idealist connotations that it was initially meant to serve as an antidote to. This trend has been diagnosed most prominently in Judith Butler ’s (2010 ) highly publicizedarticle in the Journal of Cultural Economy , which argued that theoretical articulations framedwithin the performativity problematic have experienced considerable dif culty differentiat-ing themselves from more conventional sociological notions of social construction. Theyhave increasingly reverted to idealist formulations of the relation between norms and prac-tices, so undermining the distinctive promise and critical potential of a pragmatic, non-essentialist and post-representational approach to social theory.

As part of the movement that Butler ’s essay diagnoses – the tendency for the prag-matic critique of economism to collapse into a neo-Kantian idealism – the intellectual rel-evance of the critique of economism has undergone a transformation. The substantivein uence of materialist foundationalism on social and cultural approaches to economy hasbeen minimal, and so it would be hard to argue that the tendency for performativity scholar-ship to continuously position itself in contradistinction to such approaches is a response to areal intellectual danger. Increasingly, the preoccupation with the critique of economismserves as a rhetorical means to divert attention from the importation of and implicit reliance

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on orthodox concepts and formalistic images of economy. The insistence on the performa-tive character of social constitution becomes less and less itself a critical stance and comes toserve more and more as a legitimating element in a problematic movement from materialistfoundationalism through pragmatic anti-foundationalism to an idealist foundationalism.

The concern with avoiding essentialism has not so much resulted in an effective

capacity for non-essentialist theorizing but rather serves to rationalize the reliance onorthodox conceptions of economy. At the limit the idealist impulse at work here resultsin an ‘hagiography of knowledge ’ (Bryan et al. 2012, p. 307) that attributes self-actualizingcapacities to cognitive models. This signals the danger that performativity scholarshipmight be following in the tracks of economic sociology, which over the past decadeshas established itself as a eld not by rethinking the nature of economy but by insistingon the importance of social, cultural and political ‘factors, ’ so substituting a critique of economism for a critique of economy during the very era that saw a dramatic expansionof economic rationality and its penetration into new areas of human life.

A similar idealist impasse can be found in Marxist value theory, which has undergonesomething of a renaissance in the last decade or so. Closely associated with the journal End-notes in the USA and UK and Théorie Communiste in France, a new generation of Marxisttheorists have sought to return to the critical value-form theories of the 1970s andbeyond this, to the heterodox Marxism of the Russian theorist Isaak Rubin ( 1972 ). Through-out the twentieth century, Rubin ’s anti-foundational value theory has inspired a wide arrayof value-form theories that include the early work of Diane Elson ( 1979 ), Moishe Postone(1993 ), the open Marxists, Théorie Communiste in France and Neue Marx-Lektüre inGermany (cf. Gawne 2014). In their different ways, these theorists offer an anti-foundationaltheory of the value-relation and a critique of Marxist productivism. Following Rubin, theyreject the canonical interpretation of Marx as a proponent of the labour theory of value,arguing that this represents a con ation of Marx ’s critique of political economy with theclassical theories of Ricardo and the left Ricardians. What they instead extract fromMarx’s posthumous work is what Diane Elson termed a ‘value theory of labour ’ that high-lights the determinative role of abstraction in the disciplining of labour.

Yet value-form theory too demonstrates a tendency to relapse into structuralist stasis(cf. Knafo 2007). Even the most recent exponents of value-form theory have tended to readthe abstraction of value in terms of an unchanging script and have had trouble coming togrips with the periodic crises of value that are a hallmark of modern capitalist history. Withtheir exclusive focus on the question of measure and equivalence, value theorists haveproved incapable of grappling with the various uninsured, contingent and derivativevalue-forms that have proliferated in the post-Bretton Woods era.

One way of exiting this impasse is suggested by the work of Elie Ayache ( 2010 ), whosetheory of value begins with the derivative or contingent money claim rather than theexchangeable equivalent and revises value theory in terms of an ontology of price. ForAyache, the calculation project of modern capitalism can be formulated as a mathematicalparadox: how are we to theorize the exchangeability of the non-equivalent or the liquidityof the uninsured money claim? Ayache ’s elegant solution takes its bearings from Deleuze ’s(2004 [1968 ]) ontology of non-metric difference, which is in turn inspired by developmentsin modern mathematics ranging from Mandelbrot ’s theory of fractals ( 2006 ) to topologies

of non-Euclidean space (de Landa 2002). Yet it hardly escapes the structuralist impasse. Forall its anti-foundationalist claims, Ayache ends up with an ontology of price which is asradical in its self-referential closure as any other orthodox theory of nance.

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repository of value, money has assumed a distinctly non-representational force, whichworks in ways that do not rely on economic actors believing in its fundamental value orobjectivity. And yet, even if money ’s complexity is pervaded by an affective force thatensures that ‘a dollar is a dollar ’ (Negri 1999, p. 82), we know all too well that money canfail, as it so manifestly did in the run on shadow banking that precipitated the nancial

crisis. By engaging these questions, we hope to give an impetus to the kind of culturaleconomy that does not get sidetracked with the critique of economism but remainsabove all concerned to offer a critique of economy.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential con ict of interest was reported by the author(s).

REFERENCES

AYACHE, E. (2010 ) The Blank Swan: The End of Probability , Wiley, London.BUTLER, J. (2010 ) ‘Performative agency ’, Journal of Cultural Economy , vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 147– 161.BRYAN, D., MARTIN, R., MONTGOMERIE J. & WILLIAMS, K . (2012 ) ‘An important failure: knowledge limits and the

nancial crisis ’, Economy and Society , vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 299 – 315.CALLON, M. (2008 ) ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative? ’, in Do Economists

Make Markets?: On the Performativity of Economics , eds D. Mackenzie, F. Muniesa & L.Siu, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 311 – 357.

DE LANDA, M. (2002 ) Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Continuum, London.DELEUZE, G. (2004 [1968] ) Difference and Repetition , Translation Paul Patton, Continuum, London.ELSON, D. (1979 ) ‘ The Value Theory of Labour ’, in Value: The Representation of Labour in Capitalism ,

ed D. Elson, CSE Books, London, pp. 115 – 80.GAWNE, M. (2014 ) Ontology, Composition, Affect: The Political Limits of Postworkerist Thought . PhD

dissertation, Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney.KNAFO, S. (2007 ) ‘Political Marxism and value theory: bridging the gap between theory and history ’,

Historical Materialism, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 75– 104.MACKENZIE, D. (2008 ) ‘Is economics performative? Option theory and the construction of derivatives

markets ’, in Do Economists Make Markets? , eds D. Mackenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu, PrincetonUniversity Press, Princeton, NJ, pp. 54 – 86.

MANDELBROT , B. (2006 ) The (Mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence, BasicBooks, New York.

NEGRI, A. (1999 ) ‘Value and affect ’, Boundary 2, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 77– 88.PIKETTY , T . (2014 ) Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Harvard Belknap, New Haven.POSTONE, M. (1993 ) Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx ’ s Critical Theory ,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.RUBIN, I. I. (1972 ) Essays on Marx ’ s Theory of Value, Black and Red, Detroit.

Melinda Cooper (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Departmentof Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia. Email:[email protected]

Martijn Konings (author to whom correspondence should be addressed), Department of Political Economy, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia.

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cooper - pragmatics of money and finance beyond performativity

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