Karin Knorr Cetina

What is the future of the market?

Unsere postsoziale Zukunft
Presentation (german)

Our present is characterised in the way we are increasingly accustomed (and for this purpose obliged) to see and assess human action through the eyes of the economy.

The market is no longer a clearly defined area where something happens which calls itself the “economy”. It has become a position of truth – it is not only economic activity, but also political decisions, corporate initiatives and cultural projects whose efficacy is proven in the reactions of the appropriate markets.

And with these activities specific knowledge is being put to the test: Whether political diagnoses and opinions on the matter of work are “true” is revealed in how the employment market reacts to agreed measures. Whether corporate data about communities and their dynamics are “true” is revealed in the economic success or failure of real-life and online communities. Whether cultural projects have artistic “truth” is revealed in how they are able to exist in the B2B capitalism of the cultural producers and production networks. At the very least it is shown nowhere else.

What would a “truth” of the market be?

It would be easy to denounce the logic of the economic as non-political, asocial and ignorant against the genuine values of art. It would be easy to assert that what happens on the markets has nothing at all to do with truth, and is rather only about the banal realism of competition – what succeeds is successful.

Yet the following question would be more interesting and more productive – How would it be if a concept of truth that corresponds to the market as a location of truth and the factors such as efficacy, success and implementation were incorporated, instead of declaring them as extrinsic? And what sort of knowledge is it which counts here?

Prognosis between knowledge and intervention

The prognosis shows a form of declaration in which this economic knowledge is articulated very succinctly. There are two moments therein – to identify the future and arrange it in advance, so as to be able to react “proactively” to it. And to set up the future as far as possible yourself, to bereave the future of its character, include it into an extended present more easily controlled.

On the one hand, prognosis establishes scientific knowledge in economic trading connections and confronts therein a scientific with an economic concept of truth. On the other hand, it increasingly becomes a means of influencing the market, generating effects which are favourable for the initiator of the prognosis – so that it finally emerges in the pure, empty ideal form of a “self-fulfilling prophecy”.

We would like to ask the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina which profile prognosis develops in the area of conflict between scientific and economic truth and what the market, as a place of truth in trading, will be like in the future.

Will the economy with its thinking in cyclical movements remain the system that determines the performative truth of all other truths (or become even more potent)? Will a post-economic age dawn some time? Or will this competence for all the dynamics which is called “economy” itself change and uncover quite different movements?

Cultural studies of financial markets

Karin Knorr Cetina seems to us to be in an excellent position to answer this, since she is researching two themes which cross over in view of the prognosis – the cultural practices in which scientific knowledge is generated and followed, and the dynamics of global financial markets.

Not only are financial markets the markets where today the largest profits (and losses) are made in the shortest time. They are also the system in which economic time has disengaged at its most radical from the various “real”, “material” movements around which our prevalent concepts of time are oriented.

The question of knowledge about the future is therefore particularly complex there. When we buy or sell futures, what is the result for “the future”? How does the self-referentiality of the financial markets and its “second-order economy” affect the constitution of what we continue to call “time” – always assuming that the future comes “later” than the present and that a non-bridgeable divide between the pending and the present exists?

How are prognoses proved true or falsified, where there is no longer a standardised time which depicts the framework for a comparison between earlier or later, rather that time itself is the object of transactions?

And so what about the knowledge that on the financial markets enters the narrowest connection imaginable with the practices of meeting and communicating decisions – so narrow indeed that there seems literally no time to mediate the rhythms of science and the rhythms of economic trading?

An intervention into the knowledge market

As an academic scholar Karin Knorr Cetina will probably choose the characteristic scientific form of the lecture to answer these questions. However, this lecture will also simultaneously funcion as a prognosis – and as such it will influence transactions on the market of scientific knowledge.