the wherewithal

My guest blogspot over at Socializing Finance continues…

Today’s post looks at the Magna Carta as an early attempt to perform transparency in relation to forms of borrowing. I also talk about its materiality, so here’s a picture to remind you of what it looks like (I couldn’t get this to work on the Socializing Finance site).

The Magna Carta (1215)

My first guest post on Socializing Finance looks at the status of consumer credit as a controversial object. You can have a read here.

I’ve also posted up a working paper on the site, which can be downloaded here.

Any and all comments welcome!

Just to say that I’m going to be guest blogging next week over on Socializing Finance (thanks to Daniel for the kind offer). I’ll post the links over there on here (if that makes sense).

In his engaging and often polemical Village Voice cover story, James Lieber asks the same question that many of as have been asking over the past few months: what cooked the world’s economy?

Eschewing explanations that seek to blame the profligate consumer or unworthy mortgage borrower, Lieber lays the blame squarely with the ‘dark market’ of derivative trading, whose ‘heart of darkness’ once beat vigorously in the now perhaps chastened, and very much bailed out, AIG Financial Products (their London office in particular). Lieber then proceeds to unpick in some detail some of the simply incomprehensible sums that have been poured into this and other very thirsty wells, as well as the complicities of and repeated obfuscations by the relevant regulatory bodies.

The article is carefully researched and worth reading, but I want to  use it as a spring board for some other thoughts, centred around Lieber’s allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novel, and the tale of Marlow’s ill-fated journey up the river Congo to locate the possibly insane Kurtz. The analogy certainly is resonant, perhaps echoing our own various layman’s attempts to shed light on a trade that, in some quarters at least, and with 20:20 hindsight glasses strapped firmly into place, is being branded a form of economic madness. That makes us, and Lieber, intrepid, truth-seeking Marlows, and the derivatives, the London offices, the ‘quants’ a kind of assembled incarnation of the unfathomable, compelling, disturbing, Kurtz/Congolese jungle hybrid with which the book closes.

But maybe we are also becoming Conrads? I suspect there are dangers in transforming the considerable opacities with which investigative researchers are confronted when following money-trails, into contemporary versions of Conrad’s orientalist Victorian vision, where the unknown and the alien becomes a sink for our fears, hopes and desires, obscuring some of the insights that can be gleaned by visiting the jungle and simply watching. In other words, there is a danger of obscuring the possibility of insights generated by careful empirical work (or indeed, imaginative work – sticking with the literary theme, I’m thinking of the space opened up by Jean Rhys in her postcolonial reinvention of Jane Eyre’s lady in the attic in The Wide Sargasso Sea).

This is all the more important, because just this sort of careful economic anthropology has been, and is being done on derivative markets. In their expanded analysis on Socializing Finance of findings from a recent paper, Daniel Beunza and David Stark provide some very different accounts of the causes of the contemporary financial crisis: like others before them, they focus on the models that traders use to make their decisions. But rather than debating their accuracy, or correspondences to an economic reality, with the underlying assumption that more accurate models might mitigate against future crises, they investigate what role might be played by the use of, and dependence on, models themselves. They argue that, when you sit and watch, trader’s can not only be wholly aware of the limits of their models, but that such circumspection can be productive and built into the practice of successful trading. In other words, that the current financial crisis is rooted less in doubtful models, than the lack of realisation of the productive potential of doubt itself. This is certainly an interesting proposal, especially in the context of the various doubt-busting exercises that are being attempted in governments’ attempts to get money moving again. Given the apparent paucity of success stories, perhaps it’s time governments took a second look at their models…

Apparently this blog is a little tricky to read on some computers (Macs especially maybe). I’ll work on increasing the font size over the coming days - my php skills are a little basic (I just tried changing a few bits of code and the site went haywire), so please bear with me.

Feel free to cut and paste into a word processing programme if easier…

[Edit - I've increased the text size a bit, so hopefully the site should now be a bit easier on the eye]

This post is a follow up, adding to a conversation already begun by Daniel Beunza and Peter Erdélyi, in their responses (on Socializing Finance and Peter’s Research File) to the Goldsmiths Winter Workshop in Economic Sociology that took place a couple of weeks ago. This was an event consisting of two workshop days, where a small group of PhD researchers split into two streams, to become involved in some often intensive engagement with each others’ work, as well as attending the central Performance conference, open to others. As one of the organisers of these events, along with Allan Day and Will Davies, I’d like to thank Daniel and Peter for their valuable thoughts, which do I think succeed in capturing the degree of dynamism and productive, constructive engagement by participants across their different areas of research.

I won’t spend time here repeating their summaries of the content of the Performance conference, apart from to dwell on some images that remain vivid in my memory, drawn from Koray Caliskan’s engaging presentation. In particular, his own adroit (re)performances of the performance of cotton trading in Ismir, Turkey. Leaving the lectern, Koray reproduced for us some of the bodily comportments adopted by Turkish cotton traders both prior to, and during a day’s trading. These consisted of intimate moments of self-preparation in the streets leading up to the trading pit, with traders puffing up and steeling themselves outside the pit for the impeding melee, in which fierce competition over prices is matched, or to some extent overshadowed, by the competition to perform as an Izmir cotton trader is supposed to. Hands are frequently locked behind the back, strides purposeful, expressions (if necessary) set and inscrutable, with each display attempting to navigate between neither over or underplaying the trader’s hand.

Koray’s argument was not, however, aimed at highlighting the powerful determining effects of, in this case, the ‘social’ performances of traders on market forces, but their limits: in the context of an apparent academic growth industry surrounding identification of instances of ‘performativity’, in which social scientists have been perhaps too quick to sit back upon ‘revealing’ a particular market as a social (or, perhaps more frequently, socio-technical) construction, Koray argued that it is useful to bear in mind that, in relation to the trades in the pit at least, these bodily performances have their limits, being aimed more at establishing ‘rehearsal’ prices for the later, less visible, higher volume post-pit trading than concluding profitable trades during pit-opening hours.

There is, I’m sure, a longer academic debate to be had here, which might unpack a little more the correspondences and disjunctures between bodily performances and (in particular) recently deployed concepts of economic performativity. However, I think part of the reason this stayed with me, is that it encapsulated for me the desire, across the event as a whole, to push at the boundaries of socio-economic explanations, to be suspicious of becoming overly attached to tried and tested methodological and/or theoretical approaches.

I like to think that our stream (stream A - Daniel and Peter’s have already covered much of stream B), chaired by David Stark, broadly echoed this ethic. Sometimes this was reflected in theoretical debates: Ville-Pekka Sorsa sketched out routes towards bringing together elements of two, on the face of it, oppositional theories of socio-economic life (institutional theories and an Actor Network Theory inspired theory of agencement), while Ignacio Farias attempted to open up a couple of conceptual ‘black boxes’, in looking simultaneously at the opportunities and hazards in naming something (and particularly a market device) an ‘assemblage’ and whether the pursuit of ‘innovation’ in the creative industries needs to be seen as distinct from the pursuit of the much sought after, ephemeral (and assembled) quality of ‘newness’.

Echoing the latter theme, Ann Christina Lange introduced a fascinating object of study: the strategic, material production of innovation at a Danish consultancy. Rather than a nebulous artefact emerging from an equally nebulous cloud of ‘creativity’, the once perhaps elusive emergence of an ‘idea’ is seen as a process that can not only be controlled, but actively stimulated – most memorably, by locking (well, at least confining) willing creative types into rooms stripped of light and temporal cues, to engender a process of ‘artful making’.

Carolin Gerlitz introduced us to American Apparel’s world – encompassing not only the stores, the staff, the factories, the product, but also the consumer as brand collaborator, while Erica Coslor’s presentation focused on the construction of art as a financial investment, with galleries vying with auction houses for a claim on the appropriate way to manage both an artwork and an artist’s career. In each, attempts to manage value come up against their complex contingency, whether in the interventions of anti-American Apparel activists, or the on the face of it paradoxical dependence of galleries on a system (the auction houses’ setting of visible market values) which they denounce.

The construction of the individual as consumer is, in quite different ways at the heart of the work of Chris Payne, Charlotta Bay, Jeanne Lazarus, and my own: Chris is tracing a genealogy of the indebted consumer – a category which we share an interest - unpicking some of the tensions inherent in governing a group of individuals with unprecedented (although now shrinking) access to credit; Charlotta is focusing on the implied logics of financial capability programmes in Sweden; Jeanne on the interpenetration of judgements of economic and moral worth by high street banks in France; and I presented a piece on the centrality of the body to technologies of debt collection. Irrespective of our different approaches, what we clearly all shared is a desire to reassemble the category of the consumer empirically, to focus on some of the varied processes of consumer-making, whether occurring through regulation, pedagogy, or banking/collection practices.

Roxana Bratu and Marc Lenglet gave us rich insights into two very different worlds: the opaque process of obtaining EU funding in Romania and the attempts to ensure transparency in financial markets via the figure of the compliance officer. And finally, to bring the event to a fitting close, Pierre-Marie Chauvin ended with some wine – well, more precisely, an insight into the art of making not only fine but also saleable Bordeaux wine. Robert Parker’s highly influential 100 point quantitative assessment of wine quality is shown not only as affecting prices and sales, but the types of wine producers are striving to create. Mr Parker’s wine-palate apparently gravitates towards fruit and oak. So towards fruit and oak (or at least towards the kinds of oaky fruitness Parker likes) is where many Bordeauxs are increasingly headed (I can’t resist coining the alliterative concept of personal preference performativity…).  Although, echoing Koray’s call, Pierre-Marie was circumspect: don’t be too quick to jump into new theoretical straightjackets, he reminded us: ‘economic actors are not passive recipients of categorizations, they play with their ambivalence and their multiplicity’.

A good way to end, I think.