Ontological politics

In the previous meeting we talked about performativity in an economic context. We did this with the help of Stephen Collier and a written exchange between Judith Butler and Michel Callon. Many of us had the feeling that there was a disconnect between Butler’s and Callon’s texts: in her discussion of performativity Butler somehow missed Callon’s point about the importance of materiality, while Callon somehow missed Butler’s point about critique. Butler argued that it was not enough to say that markets are effects of ongoing performances, one also needs to think about how they could be performed differently – not only by economists, but also by scholars who study them and write about them. If this is a political point, then it’s concerned not simply with epistemology (who knows better how markets work?) but with ontology (what kind of an economic reality is being performed, and how are we implicated in its performance?). The main theme for this week’s – and perhaps this term’s – discussion is going to be ontological politics; background reading is Mario Blaser’s recent article in Current Anthropology.