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How to Make Money with Words: Finance, Performativity, Language

In this article, I consider how descriptions of finance since the 2007–2008 credit crisis have offered a new template of representation for value and its changing valences, both theoretical and aesthetic. My particular concern is social scientific writing about the crisis that might be grouped loosely under the rubric of ‘performativity’, namely the argument that models (or representations, either mathematic or linguistic) produce markets, and that markets are best studied through ethnographic observation. I ask why language, performance and metaphor itself – what was once the province of a more literary tradition – have become a methodological tool for social scientists now in their particular investigations of finance. I suggest that a more complete analysis of finance may be located if economic performativity and aesthetic theories of performance are brought into dialogue. In part one, I read the ethnographic work of Donald MacKenzie, most centrally, as well as that of Janet Roitman, both of whom have isolated some literary problem of the economy: performativity and narrative, respectively. In the second section, I look at a series of artists and theorists of performance who might be understood to offer a critique of the relationship between language, money and performativity.