The paper reflects on the presuppositions and consequences of the concept of performativity (understood as the involvement of the Observer in the objects and projects he/she describes).
The paper proposes a broader notion of performativity, one that not only concerns theory but is also extended to the entire economy, which observes itself in all of its operations. This conception has the advantage of being connected with critical approaches inside economics, which highlight the central role of uncertainty and surprise. It can explain how and why performativity turns into counter-performativity and how financial operators exploit uncertainty when orienting their behaviour, expecting and using the unpredictability of the future.
Keywords: performativity; second order observation; uncertainty; risk; information; derivatives.
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ESPOSITO, Elena, 2013. The structures of uncertainty: performativity and unpredictability in economic operations. Economy and Society. 1 February 2013. Vol. 42, no. 1, p. 102–129. DOI 10.1080/03085147.2012.687908.
Performativity and inclusion of the observer
In the last few decades, the notion of performativity has successfully spread throughout many different disciplines, often with great effectiveness. The concept originates in linguistics, where Austin’s (1962) founding text, with its evocative title ‘How to do things with words’, marked a significant turning point. Austin’s text shifted the focus from the abstract study of language to its use in practical communicative operations from what language says to what language does (by saying something). However, the performative component is not limited to language. Its implications are much broader. It highlights the need to abandon the idea of an external observer observing the world (and speaking about the world), without being involved in its processes.
This requirement coincides with what observation theory has stated for many years (von Foerster, 1981) and from which the theory of social systems took its starting point (with the term ‘autology’: Luhmann, 1997, pp. 16ff.) the idea that the observer is always involved in the objects and processes he observes and describes. In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious now to ask how it could be otherwise. The answer is inevitably that the observer is in the one available world. He is also a thing and bears real consequences. We must determine what these consequences are and how they can be taken into account.
The concept of performativity is applicable to all disciplines in that it concerns not only language, but also observation in general. We could even say that this is the correlation in the humanities of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in physics. In both cases, we are forced to face a world that depends on observation, on an observer belonging to the world. The result, in both cases, is a condition of indeterminacy (in the social sciences one refers to contingency) which leads to a profound rethinking of the methods and categories of research.
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