Butler on MacKenie in Journal of Cultural Economy 2010 In adapting the theory for economic analysis, MacKenzie offers the example fromfinance of practical models that effectively alter patterns of pricing to make them morecompliant with the model itself. This form of circularity is described in effectivelyillocutionary terms since it tends to produce the phenomenon it names. But because I tonly tends
to do so, it does not act with the same immediate efficacy that a sovereigndoes when, for instance, he declares war or raises taxes. Already we see how theillocutionary model falters within the economic sphere. MacKenzie clearly notes the limitsof the Austinian paradigm for explaining how patterns of pricing tend to conform to themodels that seek to explain them, and he turns his attention to what he callscounterperformatives(2004, p. 306) as a way of explaining how the adoption of certain models can actually lead to what Austin (1962) might have called a misfire a situation in which patterns of pricing exceed or undermine the model that is supposed toexplain them.What seems clear in the adaptation of Austin for thinking about pricing is thatsomething called patterns of pricing exercise performative agency. Such patterns are notthe utterance of single subjects, and they rely on broad networks of social relations,institutionalized practices, including technological instruments. So the assumption of asovereign speaker is lost, and whatever conception of agency takes its place presumesthat agency is itself dispersed. What seems less clear is whether the Austinian model isrightly identified with the illocutionary utterance. Why is there no consideration of the perlocutionarymodel from these discussions? After all, Austin made clear that certainkinds of performative speech acts could only have effects if certain kinds of conditionswere first met. So a certain utterance can only bring about a state of affairs in time (andnot immediately) if certain intervening conditions are met. The success of a perlocutionaryperformative depends on good circumstances, even luck, that is, on an external reality thatdoes not immediately or necessarily yield to the efficacy of sovereign authority. If illocutions produce realities, perlocutions depend upon them to be successful. Whereasillocutionary performatives produce ontological effects (bringing something into being sense, the illocutionappears more clearly to rely on a certain sovereign power of speech to bring into beingwhat it declares, but a perlocution depends on an external reality and, hence, operates onthe condition of non-sovereign power.To borrow an analogy from another field, a psychoanalyst might make a suggestiveinterpretation in the course of an analytic session and that may change the dynamicbetween the analyst and analysand. 4 This change is a subsequent effect of the utterance(which itself only has a certain significance by virtue of an ongoing relationship), but it isnot the magical production of something radically new. For a perlocution to work, therehas to be a sequence of events and a felicitous set of circumstances. The perlocutionimplies risk, wager, and the possibility of having an effect, but without any strong notionof probability or any possible version of necessity.Generic performativity, according to MacKenzie, implies that economic relationshipsare performed (and re-performed) by certain practices, but that the means and mechanismof these performances are only made clear on the condition of breakdown or disruption. It seems clear that naturalized processes can and do reveal the process of naturalizationwhen the effects of naturalization are suddenly exposed as non-natural. Fair enough. HereI would like simply to add that there is a difference between claiming (a) that breakdownand disruption of performative operations can happen, and (b) that the risk of breakdownand di sruption are constitutive to any and all performative operations. The first isempirical, but the second is structural. And though these two dimensions may wellcoincide in any given analysis, it makes a difference whether one understands breakdownas constitutive to the performative operation of producing naturalized effects
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