The current financial situation highlights how central banks model linguistically and, hence, communicatively economic phenomena operating at the limits of calculation and measurement. Words are employed not merely for expressing interpretative accounts or commentaries: they create the economy itself as a communicative field and as an empirical fact. These communicative practices can inform the modelling that we all continually participate in, they enliven the innumerable simulations by which our expectations are engendered and the means by which our understanding of economic conditions are imparted prospectively.
Speaker: Professor Douglas R. Holmes, the State University of New York
Douglas R. Holmes teaches anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He is the author of Integral Europe: Fast-capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism and Cultural Disenchantments: Worker Peasantries in Northeast Italy. His current research focuses on central banks and how the personnel of these institutions model linguistically and, hence, communicatively economic phenomena operating at the limits of calculation and measurement.
Chair: Professor Mika Aaltola, Finnish Institute of International Affairs
