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ABSTRACT
In this article, I forward an analysis of the art market that seeks to emphasize the often unexamined yet central economizing practices that fuel the circulation of objects and thus contribute to the distinct patterns of consumption, ownership, and mobilization of the art world. In stressing these economizing practices, I attempt to make visible the underlying sociality and symbolic practices that provide aesthetic and cultural meaning to artistic objects and institutions. The analysis presented here derives from the so-called performativity program and that has been extended in recent years throughout economic sociology. Specifically, this article draws on the performativity program to highlight the mechanisms through which artistic objects are taken-into-account prior to their circulation in the market. As is argued, such forms of actuarial practice are not restricted to orienting action within networks of market exchange; rather, they are partly constitutive of the aesthetic and cultural values attached to art in contemporary capitalism.

Today, it is often forgotten that the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s was not only about whether market societies were more economically efficient than planned ones; more crucially, Ludwig von Mises and his disciple Friedrich Hayek depicted economic planning as a threat to the moral and political order of "Western civilization." A planned economy, these early neoliberals argued, would override the "democracy of consumers" through which individuals registered their own preferences on the market and threaten individual freedom and social peace. This article argues that early neoliberal thinkers mobilized a racialized argument against economic planning, which they depicted as a threat from "the East" and a regression to a "primitive" pre-capitalist, egalitarian morality. Against this neoliberal argument, I retrieve the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath's argument that a capitalist market economy is inherently violent and requires the suppression of non-market forms of life.

How do actors on financial markets transform the plethora of informational signals into concrete valuations of traded assets? How do they make decisions in an environment characterized by fundamental uncertainty? Although there is a rich tradition in economic sociology suggesting that emotions and other subjective factors play a decisive role in this regard, empirical studies of their relevance for economic action have remained rare. The present study seeks to fill this void. It investigates the emotional underpinnings of the practices of financial valuation in the German financial sector. Drawing on in-depth interviews with, and ethnographic observations of day traders and fund managers, the study shows that emotions are essential ingredients of their collective calculative practices. Results of the present study yield three empirically grounded key concepts that advance understanding of emotions in financial valuation: First, subjectively experienced market feelings enable traders and managers to imagine imminent market futures. Second, market sentiments reflect traders' attributions of specific emotional qualities to financial markets and facilitate their understanding of market behaviour. Third, floor emotions are collective emotions in which traders become involved in organizations and on trading floors that help mitigate situational uncertainty.

"Calculation is the life blood of politics," writes Ernest W. Lefever, "and the heart of ethics" (The Ethics of Calculation," Worldview, October, italics added). This statement should be subjected to thorough scrutiny, and searchingly criticized.Indeed, calculation is the heart of ethics as Mr. Lefever understands it. For this reason, there is for him no particular difficulty about making ethicopolitical judgements; and there is little to disturb or limit the "moral-political calculations" of which he speaks, since the heart of morality was already assumed to be calculative. Research the facts and weigh them properly: this is about all that is needed in politics; and, happily, also about all it is the business of ethics to do.

Abstract
This article is a response to Achille Mbembe's "Futures of Life and Futures of Reason," which is featured in the same issue of Public Culture. The article builds on Mbembe's concept of "wave fronts of calculation" as a means of amplifying a language for political possibilities in a moment when calculability and incalculability determine the boundaries between the biological, social, and technical.