ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that a reconstruction of the history of the notion of performativity between the philosophy of language and actor-network theory has made it possible to explain the central idea of performativist sociology, specifically the importance of technical devices in the construction of the social world. The different economic theories execute the world they claim to describe, embodied in multiple technical devices forming a vast network to assist individual decision-making. Thus, these decisions lead social actors to perform as if they conformed to the theories integrated into the techniques. The refusal to adopt the perspective of "sociologists of the social"–in other words, of those who confer on macro-social sets the status of interpretive elements of the first order in the heuristics of the social world–is the technicist approach equivalent of performativist sociology. The chapter argues that theoretical difficulty threatens the heuristic efficiency of the theory of performativity.
