PAPIERS DE RECHERCHE DU CSI - CSI WORKING PAPERS SERIES N° 0 20 20 10 The problem w ith economics: naturalism, critique and performativity Fabian Muniesa Centre de Sociolog ie de l’Innovation Mines Pa risTech fabian.muniesa(a) mines-paristech.fr CENTRE DE SOCIOLOGIE DE L’INNOVATION MINES PARISTECH / CNRS UMR 7185 60 Boulevard Saint-Michel 75272 Paris cedex 06 FRANCE http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/ PAPIERS DE REC HERCHE DU CSI Cette collection a pour but de rendre aisément disponible un ensemble de documents d e travail et autres matériaux de discussion issus des recherches menées au CSI (CENTRE DE SOCIOLOGIE DE L’INNOVATION). Tous les droits afférant aux textes diffusés dans cette collection appartiennent aux auteurs. Des versions ultérieures des papiers diffusés dans cette collection sont susceptibles de faire l’objet d’une publication. Veuillez consulte r la base bibliographique des travaux du CSI pour obtenir la référence exacte d’une éventuelle version publiée. 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CENTRE DE SOCIOLOGIE DE L’INNOVATION MINES PARISTECH / CNRS UMR 7185 60 Boulevard Saint-Michel 75272 Paris cedex 06 FRANCE http://www.csi.ensmp.fr/ The Problem with Economics: Naturalism, Critique and Performativity Fabian Muniesa The idea according to which economics does contribute in a performative way to the construction, enactment, initiation, transformation or maintenance of economic things has gained some relevance in the social sciences, but has also raised scholarly discomfort and criticism.1 The hypothesis developed in this paper is that such discomfort can serve as a useful vehicle to analyze naturalism in economic reason, or, more precisely, to explore some features of a somewhat naturalistic style that often characterizes the taking into consideration of economic things. The intellectual device that I use throughout the paper in order to tackle this question consists of a series of “breaching thought experiments” in which the behavior of economic reason is confronted to annoying situations (one being the claim that economics is performative) with the purpose of showing what is taken for granted when the naturalness of economic things is at stake. I consider here “economic reason” in a wide sense, and I refer with this expression to a variety of things: traits of modern economic thought and of economic science (i.e. economics), but also aspects of economic logic operating in economic reality, or 1 Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa and Lucia Siu, ed., Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). This paper was initially conceived as a contribution to the Colloque de Cerisy organized by Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour on “The Historical Anthropology of Scientific Reason” (12-19 July, 2006), and was also presented at the Goldsmiths College Conference on “Markets, Economics, Culture and Performativity” (6 March, 2007). A later version as been prepared for a special issue edited by Silvia Posocco and Sadie Wearing on “Performativities: Contexts, Domains, Perspectives”. I would like to thank Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, Will Davies, José Ossandón, Scott Lash, Keith Hart, Donald MacKenzie, Michel Callon, Daniel Beunza, Emilio Luque and David Teira for their remarks on this unusual essay. This version: January 2010. 1 characteristics of modern critique of the economy or modern critique of economic thought as well. The mixing-up of all these things may generate confusion and ambivalence, but it is precisely this otherwise usual mixture of aspects that I want to address in this paper. The notion of “naturalism” is also very general here: I employ it mainly in reference to the intellectual style of modern scientific thought and to the idea of natural laws, although I consider also, more prosaically, situations in which some economic things may be referred to as being natural. What I call “breaching thought experiments” constitute here a tentative intellectual game rather than a serious research methodology. These experiments resemble, in some way, the breaching experiments developed in the tradition of ethnomethodology.2 For the purpose of this article, breaching experiments can be defined as a series of annoying questions or situations that aim at bothering a normal course of action in order to reveal what normality is made of, or at least to point to some features of interest. The idea here is to test the behavior of economic reason in some odd situations. These experiments are also thought experiments in the sense that they do not correspond to actual, empirically monitored events. But they are not fully imaginary, however, because they are based on experience gathered in real conversations with economists or with scholars that criticize economics, in real observations of such conversations, in real exposure to economic scholarly publications and in real self- exercising of economic reasoning and of economic critique. The reader is kindly asked to add her own considerations to mine, as both a potential experimenter and a potential experimental subject. But, before pursuing with the experiments, I shall provide an introductory comment with more details about the performativity of economics and about naturalistic style in economic reasoning. Performativity and naturalism Scholarly speaking, and although the notion of performativity is connected to a wide variety of academic concerns and intellectual traditions, the precise topic of the performativity of economics is often defined as an emerging research program resulting from the penetration of 2 Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 2 science and technology studies into economic sociology.3 The extent to which the natural sciences do shape the world they scrutinize has been explored at length in science and technology studies.4 This works for the social sciences too, and it is probably Michel Callon’s proposal that best characterizes the move towards economics: studying the ways in which the sciences of the economy do shape their objects would be the first move towards a renewal of the sociological understanding of how markets themselves are constructed.5 Empirical work such as the one undertaken by Donald MacKenzie on the role of financial theory in the construction of contemporary financial markets puts forward the extent to which a sound sociological analysis of economic things needs including economics and its effects among its objects of inquiry.6 As more and more markets appear nowadays as made out of market sciences (economics at large, including finance, marketing, accounting and other market-enabling disciplines), this empirical stake cannot but make sense. But Michel Callon’s formulation of this research direction points out some rather radical theoretical implications that challenge — to some extent and in clear resonance with actor-network theory — the usual tenets of economic sociology.7 3 See, for instance, Marion Fourcade, “Theories of Markets and Theories of Society,” American Behavioral Scientist 50 (2007): 1015–34. 4 See, for instance, Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For a cogent overview, see Casper Bruun Jensen, “A Nonhumanist Disposition: On Performativity, Practical Ontology, and Intervention,” Configurations 12 (2004), 229–61. 5 Michel Callon, “Introduction: The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics,” in The Laws of the Markets, ed. Michel Callon (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 1–57. 6 Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press); MacKenzie, “Is Economics Performative? Option Theory and the Construction of Derivative Markets,” in MacKenzie et al., Do Economists Make Markets?, 54–86. 7 Michel Callon, “What Does it Mean to Say that Economics is Performative?,” in MacKenzie et al., Do Economists Make Markets?, 311–357. Actor-network theory, a scholarly viewpoint of which Michel Callon is an active proponent, originated as both a materialist approach to the study of science and technology and a pragmatist critique of regular sociological explanatory categories. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3 Although it is more than reasonable to acknowledge the fact that economists, with their tools and theories, sometimes intervene in the construction of markets, to consider that usual economic things such as “economic preferences”, “marginal utility”, “transaction costs”, “equilibrium prices”, “rational expectations”, “aggregate demand”, “credit risk” or “return on capital” are not naturally-occurring things but rather artificial things which are always the outcome of an intense work of constitution — a work that includes the sciences of the economy among its key ingredients — is probably a more disturbing idea, an idea whose disturbance is best summarized by the provocative adage that can be extracted from Michel Callon’s proposal: that “the economy is embedded not in society but in economics.”8 Further disturbance is added to this by the fact that the problem of truth and falsehood, a problem to which sciences (economic or otherwise) are usually expected to be exposed to, is neatly disregarded, within this viewpoint, in favor of the problem of success and failure. This challenges indeed the efficacy of a purely epistemological critique of economics: the truth or falsehood of economics depends now on its capacity to construct worlds in which its claims can hold together, not on any natural adequacy of these claims to their external objects.9 Performativity would thus hamper not only science but also, more fatally, the rational critique of science — and these annoyances echo, of course, the objections to constructivism that have often animated science and technology studies in the case of the natural sciences.10 The idea of the performativity of economics has been indeed critiqued in these or similar terms, sometimes with an explicit reference to its connections to actor-network theory.11 In substance, this idea, it is said, would remove the strength of an epistemological critique of 8 Callon, “Introduction”, in The Laws of the Markets, quote from page 30. 9 Francesco Guala’s phrasing conveys this idea well: “Economic rationality is not like Newton’s laws, which are supposed to be at work everywhere in the universe. It is a fragile property that must be carefully preserved by creating a hospitable environment.” Francesco Guala, “How to Do Things with Experimental Economics,” in MacKenzie et al., Do Economists Make Markets?, 128–62, quote from page 147. 10 Michel Callon, “Whose Imposture? Physicists at War with the Third Person,” Social Studies of Science 29 (1999): 261–86. 11 Daniel Miller, “Turning Callon the Right Way Up,” Economy and Society 31 (2002): 218–33; Ben Fine, “Callonistics: A Disentanglement,” Economy and Society 32 (2003), 47–84; 2003; Philip Mirowski and Edward Nik-Khah, “Markets Made Flesh: Performativity, and a Problem in Science Studies, Augmented with Consideration of the FCC Auctions,” in MacKenzie et al., Do Economists Make Markets?, 190–224. Of course, I condense here critiques in a way that deprives them from their original scholarly contextualization. The purpose is not to discuss them but to use them as stylized vehicles for a wider reflection on naturalism as a problematic feature of modern economic reason. 4 economics (i.e. a critique signaling a lack of truth in scientific statements), and also possibly of a sociological critique (i.e. a critique signaling social, explanatory forces more fundamental and effective than the work of economics). The cultures of scientific thinking and scientific practice, the attachment to ideals of natural inquiry and intellectual critique in modern thought, and the connections of all this to the development of the modern world itself are at the center of a number of contributions to the history of science and to the anthropology of scientific activities. Modern reason has thus been scrutinized in more than one way and put to the test of various forms of historical and anthropological contextualization. As it is aptly put in the promotional jacket of a recently published book, “objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises.”12 One particularly ambitious anthropological venture in this line is the inclusion of modern scientific thought into the structural classification of the different modes of identification of beings undertaken by Philippe Descola.13 Descola classifies, in a structural fashion, the several ways in which human beings might consider their interiority, and this interiority’s relations to external beings, especially to beings other than other human beings. Naturalism is, according to this classification, a structure of intellection characterized by a univocal and exterior nature. Within a naturalistic mode of intellection, there might be several interiorities, preferably human (i.e. human subjects), but all beings (including human beings but not only) share a similar physicality. The modern scientist can thus talk about multiculturalism (several cultures, several ways of thinking and of seeing things, several ways of experiencing human interiority), but never about “multinaturalism” (since there is only one nature). But human beings have lived and still can live without partaking of this form of thought. In animism, another section of Descola’s classification, all beings (and not exclusively human ones) are similar in the sense that they all share similar interiorities. But they are different in the sense that they have different physicalities. From an animist perspective (for instance in Amazonian thought), everything has a soul, everything is a person. Trees have a soul, animals have a soul, and rivers have a soul. And all souls are similar in kind. But everything might not share the 12 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, ed., Objectivity (New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007). 13 Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). See also Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 same nature. A soul may have different bodies that live in different natures.14 In animism, there is certainty about the universality of spirit, but there is uncertainty about the universality of body and matter.15 One important hypothesis defended by scholars interested in the particular style of Western modern reason is that the latter is plainly naturalistic. Human beings are strictly distinguished from other beings. They distinguish themselves because they have one kind of interiority that we call subjectivity and which might be idiosyncratic. But they all share among them and with other beings a similar physicality, in the sense that they share the same laws of nature. Bodies are bodies here and elsewhere. Molecules are molecules here and elsewhere. Radiation is radiation here and elsewhere. The self-evident outcome of that state of mind is modern scientific inquiry. Galileo’s motto is crucial in this characterization of naturalism: the book of nature might not be easy to read, but there is surely only one and it is written in mathematical language, i.e. a language prone to scientific reading. Authors such as Bruno Latour, however, have opposed meticulously this version of what modern thought is and of how it operates.16 For Latour, naturalism corresponds to the picture modern science keenly provides of itself, but is at odds with what modern science really does. According to Latour, the archetypical modern thinker speaks with a forked tongue, praising naturalism, pretending to be a naturalistic-minded inquirer, but in practice not stopping from producing hybrids, from entangling human beings and other beings and from provoking nature rather than unveiling it. Such duplicitous manners constitute probably the main outcome of the symmetric anthropology of modern reason undertaken by Bruno Latour. 14 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro uses the notion of “multinaturalism” to characterize this feature of Amazonian thought: Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4 (1998): 469–88; Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge 10 (2004): 463–84. See also Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 15 The structural classification proposed by Philippe Descola adds to naturalism and animism two other forms of intellection, which are totemism and analogism. In naturalism, the universality of physicality is linked to the contingency of interiorities. In animism, the generalization of interiority is a counterpoint to the differentiation of physicalities. Totemism is characterized by a moral and material continuity of physicality and interiority. Analogism is the realm of multiple differences at both levels, and of multiple networks of correspondence that make the world readable as an ongoing chain of relations. 16 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 6 Is naturalism a fundamental characteristic of economic thought? Or is economics an instance of the modern forked tongue? My purpose in this paper is not (and could not be) to try to settle this issue. It is, at best, to provide some elements that could help considering the case of economic reason with a few observations on the “naturalistic style” often displayed in economics or about economics. The claim on the performativity of economics can intervene in this inquiry as an assertion that breaches the naturalistic style of economic thought, but also as a test of the forked tongue hypothesis. In what follows, I propose a series of situations (which I have referred to as “breaching thought experiments”) that allow characterizing several aspects of this question. Experiment 1: name both science and object It is easy to recognize in economics a sort of a naturalistic style, which is of course acknowledged to a great extent. We may all have different cultures, opinions, beliefs, but we all share the same economic laws. Money is money here and elsewhere. Budgetary constraints are budgetary constraints here and elsewhere. Marginal utility is marginal utility here and elsewhere. We may have all different preferences, but we all certainly have such a thing as “economic preferences” that can be taken into account economically and aggregated together into some sort of an economic calculation. Any sort of process, regardless of its particular point and scope, as soon as it is costly (and any process may be costly) is economic in nature and thus prone to economic analysis. Economic characteristics do characterize individuals, but also groups, families, countries, firms, and also natural resources, ecosystems, animals or, why not, cells, neurons and computer programs. This seems naturalistic indeed: a reason that goes through all and unifies all, an economic nature that is transversal to all bodies and to all souls. Is economic reason the paramount naturalistic reason? Let me point to a most curious index of naturalization that characterizes economic reason, an index that is actually more visible in French that in English. Although in the English vocabulary a difference is often drawn between economics (the science) and the economy (the thing), in French the same word may be used to refer to both: économie. L’économie is “the economy”, but also “economics” in the sense of the academic discipline. The later can also be referred to as sciences économiques, but économie corresponds to a 7 fairly widespread use, especially among professionals of the discipline. Note the oddity: for the study of société (society), you have sociologie (sociology); for coeur (the heart) you have cardiologie (cardiology); for minerais (minerals) you have minéralogie (mineralogy); but for the study of économie, you have économie.17 A science that calls itself just like its object: this may look like an extreme symptom of naturalism, or maybe rather like a brilliant coup of naturalization. Of course, such anecdotal comments should not stand in place of references to a long and fruitful tradition in the history of ideas that explores the naturalistic style in economic reason. This tradition has studied at length the construction of the categories of modern economics, starting with the notion of economic individual, the notion of self-interest, the notion of utility, and so forth, including also the study of how mathematics and formalistic languages in general have allowed economics to emancipate, as a science, from moral philosophy.18 But it is nonetheless interesting to stop at issues such as the ordinary naming of economics. Is economics the knowledge or the object of knowledge? In French, this question (our first “breaching thought experiment”) is in effect slightly annoying, and revealing. And perhaps in English too, especially in American English, a language in which a political speech on “economics” can indeed meant to be on the current state of affairs in the national economy or, conversely, praise for the importance of “the economy” can indeed signify a call for more attention to scientific economic thinking.19 17 In a staged version, this first “breaching thought experiment” could consist in playing, in the conversation, with what would have been a logical guess for the name of the science: “Vous voulez dire économicologie” (“You mean economicology”). This instance of a “breaching thought experiment” is based on a real conversation with a British academic on how to translate slightly ambiguous expressions like “économie des conventions” or “économie alternative”, for which both “economics” and “economy” may make sense. 18 See, for instance, Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Le sacrifice et l’envie: le libéralisme aux prises avec la justice sociale (Paris: Grasset, 1992); Bruna Ingrao and Giorgio Israel, The Invisible Hand: Economic Equilibrium in the History of Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990); Pierre Demeulenaere, Homo oeconomicus: enquête sur la constitution d’un paradigme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). 19 For an interesting reflection on the origins of the notion of “the economy”, see Timothy Mitchell, “Fixing the Economy,” Cultural Studies 12 (1998): 82–101; Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002); Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press). 8