mackenzie seminar – theory or just-so stories?

Teppo

I have really enjoyed reading MacKenzie’s An Engine, Not a Camera. A well-written, engaging, and delightfully detailed book about the emergence and history of financial economics.

But, where is the theory in the book, or, where is the “performativity”? While there are occasional excursus of theoretical explanation, the book more generally felt like a just-so story (and, there certainly is nothing wrong with that – see Kipling’s delightful Just So Stories), rather than a theoretical work with meaningful evidence. Put differently, the book is historicism and story-telling at its best, but, a theoretical contribution? – I don’t believe so.

Let me explain. Performativity and the strong program of social construction is associated with, or rather founded on, the belief that there is, as such, no meaningful reality outside of that which is created through language, culture, and, in this case, theory. In other words, there are no meaningful, pre-existing truths, or, “false” or “true” theories (note how words such as false, true, and reality are always put in quotation marks), but theories are a function of the epistemic communities that one belongs to, and theories reflexively create reality rather than explaining theory-independent reality. Thus, in invoking “performativity” MacKenzie in essence is arguing that financial theories and models, and markets for that matter, do not meaningfully assess any underlying real value, but rather, create it. The distinctions here are quite fine and may seem like petty semantics as the performativity argument is extremely slippery, but any potential theoretical contribution hangs in the balance of these fine but momentous (well, “momentous” to our small academic communities – the things we quibble about…) distinctions.

The problem of performativity essentially is that the argument suggests that theory pre-exists or creates, rather than describes or explains, reality, at least in its strong version (e.g., Latour and Woolgar, in Laboratory Life, argue that microbes do not really exist, only as they were “created” and realized through scientist interaction – Kuhnian extremism). The effort in the strong program of social construction is to take knowledge out of the domain of the universal and real, and to bring it into the domain of the contingent and social (Martin Hollis edited a great book on the matter – Rationality and Relativism – with contributions by Bloor and Barnes – early developers of the “strong program” to which MacKenzie contributes). [Click below to read more…]

If we take the definition that “performativity is the idea that theories and models bring about the very conditions that they attempt to explain,” then, the immediate question is – why? It seems that theories take effect where there are justified reasons for believing that they are true. Thus, not just anything can be asserted (and thus created) as reality, which seems to be the case based on performativity. In short, performativity lacks meaningful boundaries for what can be asserted and why it is taken to be true and real, rather it simply in post hoc fashion labels whatever happens to emerge in reality as: performativity.

Now, can theories be wrong and nonetheless be acted upon (and thus become real)? Of course they can. But, this however in no way provides evidence for performativity, even though MacKenzie hopes to make these links. Theories over time get “checked” by reality, and continually adjusted over time, with increasingly better explanations of given phenomenon. Now, does the fact that theories affect reality provide evidence for performativity? No. Of course true theories can affect reality (the natural sciences provide plenty of robust examples), but, theories only affect reality within the limits of their actual explanation, impact and improvement (without quotations marks) on that reality – a distinction that performativity does not seem to make. That is, the truth of theories and associated progress is not mere rhetoric, but rather, real.

As a final comment – performativity is also extremely ad hoc in that when predictions of theories and models are not found to be true (the key thesis of performativity is that theories, whether false or true, strongly create reality), they are simply labeled counterperformativity. That is ad hoc, and suspiciously convenient for retrospective story-telling.

Now, stepping back, the discussion above of course involves deep epistemological commitments, and thus I do not aim to necessarily change the mind of the card-carrying social constructionist. But, based on the arguments above, performativity seems to fall well short of theoretical and logical rigor. This is important to note, as other reviews have also lauded the book for its historical accuracy, but they have not tackled the associated theoretical matters, but have labeled the theory mere “philosophizing” that the reader needs to wade through to get to the historical facts and nuggets (see e.g., David Warsh’s review of the book). Again, I don’t dispute the facts of MacKenzie’s well-written and engaging book, but, the facts don’t support his theory of performativity. I doubt the author sees the book’s contribution only in re-telling facts associated with the emergence of financial economics, but rather, in advancing the theory of performativity. Of course, it was not quite clear to me whether MacKenzie hoped to argue for a strong version of performativity (in fact, I was looking for more discussion of his theory), I could see some short term “weak-weak”-form performativity in his arguments, but most efforts in social construction, particularly its strong incarnations (a school of thought that MacKenzie is associated with), hope to have their cake and eat it too, rather than just nibble at the edges.

Undoubtedly, more on this book later.