Representation as Intervention: The Case of Money


Dean Curran, University of Calgary

Building on J.L. Austin’s account of ‘doing things with words’, a growing body of literature has sought to overcome the account of science as passively recording society and nature. This literature has often sought to highlight the ‘performative’ nature of social science – that social sciences do things, rather than just representing them. Most of these accounts have sought to overcome passive, neutral accounts of science by rejecting the representational role of social science. In terms of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, this literature conceives of social science more in terms of making than discovering social reality. This paper proposes an alternative account of the active nature of social science. Rather than rejecting a representational account of social science, this paper proposes to account for the active nature of social science through an account of representation as intervention. Representation as intervention illuminates this active characteristic of social science in two ways. First, it highlights how different methods of representation produce different representational accounts of social life. Second, it highlights how different representational accounts of social life in turn intervene in social life in different ways. As such, this approach can speak to the key performative insight of social science, which is that it does things in the world, without abandoning the fundamental representational insights of social science – that is, that social science is about social life, even if it perceives it in certain, specific ways and that these forms of representation actively reshape this reality. Having motivated an account of ‘representation as intervention’, this paper develops a provisional investigation of money as both a form of representation, and as a form of intervention through its representational qualities in contemporary social life. In this way, this paper aims to connect debates regarding the role of representation in social science more closely to contemporary debates in economic sociology revolving around economic performativity and the sociology of money.

This paper will be presented at the following session: