Misappropriation as market making: Butler, Callon, and street food in San Francisco, California

Although failure and misappropriation have been central to Judith Butler’s theorizing of performativity, such concerns have been largely absent in the performativity studies of markets inspired by Michel Callon. Indeed, Callon’s performativity has been criticized for ‘presuming efficacity’ and overemphasizing ‘stabilizing processes’. In this paper, I propose a distinction between ‘science studies’ performativity (which privileges economic theory) and ‘performative agency’ (which attends to the constitution of economic agency). Previous attempts to discuss Callon and Butler together have tended to oppose her performativity to the former approach, but I suggest that the latter allows for a more productive engagement. I illustrate how this alternative offers a way to address persistent critiques of market performativity by incorporating Butler’s understanding of performative failure. The usefulness of this argument is demonstrated through a case study of the recent transformation of the street food market in San Francisco. The details of the case are drawn from ethnographic study conducted in 2009, and describe how a market that had been ‘known’ to lack dynamism became remade almost overnight.