[Séminaire conjoint AxPo-CEE] Monetary Policy and Its Discontents: If Words Fail

We, all of us, dwell within a communicative space saturated with models and data and we are, thus, in mysterious ways, creatures of data, a deluge of numbers, ersatz facts increasingly bereft of meaning.  We are thereby fated to navigate a forest of symbols that has increasingly become a thicket of clichés.  Under these conditions, how do we create forms of knowledge that are responsive to human concerns, not merely objective abstractions of them? How do we act upon on knowledge, which is contextual, prospective, relational and, above all, explanatory? This condition, I argue, defines the decisive struggles of our time.  Anthropology is internal to these struggles, not removed from them.  My interest in central bankers is premised on how these figures engage with knowledge—again, knowledge which abstracts our concerns verses knowledge which is responsive to them— and how this engagement is expressed institutionally in monetary policy revealing the entangled relationship between the market and society. I further argue that this intermediation between the market and society depends on the load-bearing capacity of language, the dynamics of conversations broadly conceived. We are living at moment when the potential for polarization, fragmentation, and atomisation is acutely manifest in the domains of monetary affairs, domains in which the authority of institutional knowledge is being challenged and the potential for engaged conversations supressed.  For the last two decades I have been focused on why words matter for central bankers, now I am preoccupied with what eventuates when words fail.

Speaker 

Douglas Holmes, Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY)

Discussant

Zsófia Barta, Sciences Po, CEE