The Technological Market as an Object of Embodied Attraction

• In Event: 508 - Section on Body and Embodiment Paper Session. Embodiment, Science, and Technology

Abstract

The Technological Market as an Object of Embodied Attraction

This paper considers the largest, most global, electronically mediated financial market, the currency market and how it engages participants from a microsociological perspective. Drawing on authorship theory, agency concepts, discourse theory, the notion of scopic media, Mead's and other theoretical ideas, I ask how the market can be seen as an object of (bodily) engagement and attraction. What sort of ‘party’ is a market and how can we understand it to be independent of market participants? How do we have to imagine an engagement with the market works—if we mean more by this than that investors and speculators hold positions in the market and depend on it for profit? The paper differentiates between various levels of the presentation of the market’s self—and between several pathways for bodily involvement associated with these levels. Markets appear to be not only a type of object, but a type of agent—one that is synthetic, cultural, spectacular. Traders experience the market as the central ‘other’ of their world. They also experience it sensorily and sensually. The various agency-dimensions of the market—the action milieu it provides—might be seen as one of the reasons for its spectacular and captivating character. Another reason may be the sensory, attention capturing, presence on screen that stimulates implicit processing.

Author

• Karin D. Knorr Cetina, University of Chicago