Performativity, in the context of economics, opens up new possibilities in the social order and creates new ontologies and epistemologies. (Perm/a2 the neg cards below) Boldyrev & Svetlova 16

To begin with, the performativity perspective entails a new ontology— or at least leads us to rethink our ontological commitments. Revision of ontology takes a form of epistemological scandal, for many generations of scholars were and still are socialized with the idea of emancipated science for which a reference to an independent ‘reality’ at least does not compli- cate further inquiry and most often is not very problematic at all. The per- formativity perspective challenges these views and opens up the whole new ontological domain of ‘economic things’5—the diversity of financial prod- ucts as both descriptions and their references (Muniesa 2014); theoretical claims embodied in a rule or in a ‘market device’ (Callon 2007a, b); the staging of consumer qualities provoked by the marketing mechanisms (Araujo et al. 2010); and so on. This ‘reality’ populated by human and non-human ‘actants’ is complex, plural, malleable, and contingent; to explore it, non-conventional ways are needed—prompted, again, by these very ontological innovations.6 It would be wrong to assert that a unified ontology is being formu- lated. Rather, many different ideas are currently tried out, but all of them somehow inspire new general interpretations of what the (social) world is and how it works. In particular, the performativity perspective leads us to focus on agency distributed among ‘individuals,’ ideas, devices, and material practices—reinforced by many contemporary accounts of situ- ated and distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995; Clark 2011; Herrmann- Pillath 2010, 2013).7 This implies rethinking the way institutional reality is organized, and reconceptualizing the opposition between the natural and the artificial—for the reality we live in is always already an institu- tional one. Although one still could focus on rules and conventions as stuff of the everyday life (Searle 2005; Herrmann-Pillath 2012; Guala, this volume), performativity studies suggest abandoning or radically revis- ing individualistic accounts of agency. For them, a convention is always already embodied in the world, and it is this unstable, heterogeneous, and contingent reality that lets individual agency or self-consciousness emerge. Institutional reality is not just ‘socially constructed’ or provoked from the outside—it is also self-provoking. The neorealist turn in philosophy (e.g., in Bryant et al. 2011), although not reducible to or fully reconcilable with the STS perspectives, is just another version of this general change of ontological sensitivity (Barad 2003; Law 2008). Another overarching tendency consists in rethinking the place of language in social life. This is a huge theme in itself, but performativity perspective is quite naturally led in this direction due to the work of its progenitors, notably Wittgenstein and Austin. As this volume testifies, lan- guage reality remains an inherent part of the performativity accounts. How can our language—and, by analogy, our theories, our reflexive attempts— be intertwined with the sociality of our existence? In a narrower sense, new words, new terms and concepts, once introduced, may define their own realities (Ferraro et al. 2005). But all other kinds of mediatory phe- nomena, or ‘mediating instruments’ (Miller and O’Leary 2007)—rules, technologies, incentives—can be rephrased as signs and/or speech acts.8 Economic things often come about after being written, as in the case of accounting (Vosselman 2014). Moreover, many economic entities, such as prices or organizations, can also be subject to this linguistic reinterpreta- tion. The new understanding of ‘reality’ involves grasping it as a language phenomenon—without, however, indefinitely expanding the boundaries of language. The challenge is to properly invest our linguistic intuitions into broader frameworks. Finally, there is a distinct politics of performativity. At their inception, performativity studies were concerned with the tendencies of economiza- tion, with economic theories imposing themselves onto the non-economic realms. At stake here are mutual autonomy, recognition, and tensions between the economic and the non-economic (or ‘the social’). Now, a critical task is to reveal the genealogy of economization, to stop treat- ing particular social structures as pre-given, to see them being constantly produced and reproduced, and sometimes to reveal a hypocrisy of cer- tain practices—claiming to involve naturalistic or laissez-faire attitudes but actually doing otherwise (see also Muniesa, this volume). The concern is, of course, with the growing standardization and homogenization of the social, with homo oeconomicus and economic regimes asserting themselves, as it were; with quantification (Porter 1995, 2008), ‘framing,’ and ‘dis- entanglement’ penetrating into deeper structures of our communities (for critiques of this kind, see Marglin 2008). All kinds of more recent debates around ‘libertarian paternalism’ are also important for the political aspect of performativity (see e.g., White 2013).