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Theory, Culture & Society
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Traders’ Engagement with Markets

A Postsocial Relationship

Karin Knorr Cetina

Urs Bruegger

This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial relations constituted through trading online in the foreign exchange market. Desire is constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects that constitute persons virtually.

Key Words: foreign exchange market • Lacan • online trading • postsocial relations • traders

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 5-6, 161-185 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/026327602761899200
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