The future never arrives

On gesture in the world[1]

Time has been annihilated. As early as 1848, and the onset of the telegraph, came the claim that from now on, duration and distance will no longer exist. We could tell a history of modernism that charted the course of the world from this moment as one of greater and greater abstraction, as “all that is solid melts into air” (Marx:2002:4 [3]. Such a history would have globalisation as a further intensification of the process of modernism: rather than places, we have equivalences – as capitalism renders cultures exchangeable, different only within a prefigured system of value. Rather than the body and particular expressions, we have capital, circulating freely through fibre-optic cables.

Given this movement towards greater abstraction, Fig. I, a snapshot from a film made just over a hundred years after a telegram is sent announcing the annihilation of time, poses a quandary.

Antonioni’s depiction of modern alienation, L’Eclisse[4], centres on the bustle of the stock market in Rome. Here, at the centre of the capitalist universe, in the place, or the non-place, we expect to find the abstraction of money in its purest form; we find, instead, the gesture. Not simply the body at the heart of capitalism[5]: a particular gesture, singular to a place and a local economy of signification at odds with capital’s abstractive power.

In her ethnography of the stock markets in Chicago and London, Zaloom (2006:51-72) explains the gestural language of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT). The hand is turned inwards to show a desire to buy, outwards, to sell. One to five is signalled as one might expect, 6-9 by turning the hand sideways. Zero is a closed fist. The figure of the man on the stock market (and it is almost always a man): he is not the globe, nor yet is he globalisation: he is in a world, a particular one, which denotes customs and conventions that have no simple relationship to capitalism – the conventions, for instance, of gestural communication, the customs of Italian, and indeed Roman, personal relations. Furthermore, all these customs and conventions should not be seen as being contrary to capitalism; rather, they emerge through it: only through the market: the gestures, only through state capitalism: the personal relations.

At the centre of capitalism, there is a flurry of arms. How we understand these gestures is the central problematic of this essay.

Figure I: Still from Antonioni, Michaelangelo. L’Eclisse (1962).

I. the world has disappeared

In hypermodernity, Augé claims (1995:75-116), people increasingly come to know the world through signs of things, rather than through things in themselves; through a small town and its signs for shops and tourist attractions, glimpsed from a motorway, rather than through the town itself. The world’s financial markets offer superficial confirmation of such a claim. In March 2004, for instance, out of the 51 million contracts sold at the CBOT, only 3% ended up in the delivery of a material good (Zaloom:97); in such a market signs – in this case, money – have an (almost)[6] entirely autonomous existence from the material goods to which they supposedly refer.

A narrative that sees the increasing prevalence of signs over what might once have been called use-value is common to many accounts of globalisation, Augé included. However, what is frequently occluded is the degree to which these narratives are continuous with what commentators like Georg Simmel believed was happening in modernity. In his celebrated essay, The Metropolis and Mental Life, Simmel (1971[1903]:324-339) sets out the distinction between village life, with its relationships based on emotion, and the rational life of the city:

All emotional relationships between persons rest on their individuality, whereas intellectual relationships deal with persons as with numbers, that is – as with elements which, in themselves, are indifferent, but which are of interest only insofar as they offer something objectively perceivable (ibid:326).

For Simmel, the intensification of stimulus in the city, combined with the presence of strangers, means people increasingly dealt with each other as abstract and equivalent categories.

In Simmel, money provides the means by which people are abstracted from themselves. In Augé, money is replaced by the notion of sign, but the process remains identical. For instance, in supermodernity, Augé (1995:103) holds that individuals can only enter contractual relationships – precisely, relationships determined by numbers. In a discussion of Marx’s analysis of M-C-M (the way in which money is freed of its productive constraints to become capital, and then re-produces itself as itself – rather than as a commodity, for instance – before being reinserted as money), Jameson (1997:251) produces a similar analysis, claiming: “capital itself becomes freefloating. It separates itself from the concrete context of its productive geography.” Financial markets, for Jameson, create a disembodied spectre of value without mooring in a mode of production. This is structurally equivalent to Augé’s analysis: in one, relations based on place are replaced by contracts; in Jameson, capital also separates itself out from geography and becomes a sovereign domain of equivalence.

To put this process in the context of the figure of the gesture of the stock market trader: this gesture is an aberration because it supposes precisely the type of bodily, cultural relation that should have been effaced, or at least circumscribed, by the process of modernity/globalisation, which should not allow for local clusters of meaning to exist at the heart of the deterritorialising machine. In this sense, the gesture of the trader seems like a figure of incomplete modernity; soon the computer and the internet will efface this moment of bodily habitus at the centre of capitalism. Such an argument would parallel that of Jameson (1992) in Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism[7], where he argues that far from constituting a break with modernism, the fragmentary indeterminacy of postmodernism is part of an incomplete modernity.

The disappearance of this remnant seemed at hand in 2005, when the New York Stock Exchange announced a merger with Archipelago, an electronic exchange, and 200 years of pit trading seemed at an end. Ultimately, this final closure seemed to support Jameson’s theory that “globalization is rather a kind of cyberspace in which money-capital has reached its ultimate dematerialisation” (1997:260).

II. The gesture reappears

The claims that a new more rational age is on the horizon, without the restrictions of the social, have of course been made before, just as the claim that the world is now dematerialised echoes the modernist concerns of Georg Simmel. It is instructive in this regard to look at the development of an almost caricatural Foucauldian institution: the CBOT. The building constructed by the CBOT on LaSalle Street in 1930 seems to be inspired by Bentham. In response to growing commerce and Chicago’s position as the capital of America’s, if not the world’s, derivative markets, the CBOT designed a building in which everyone was designed to see everyone else – perfect vision enabling perfect information. Such a structure was intended to prevent personal and social relations forming where certain groups where favoured due to their position in the room (Zaloom:2006:42). When the traders entered the new building, however, there were immediately complaints: they couldn’t hear anything, it was said; noise could not be distinguished from information. Immediately, the traders started to form social groups within this non-social space.

The architects of electronic systems of trading also claimed that it will be faster, more efficient, and more equal – one of the most forceful arguments against pit trading in Chicago (which fundamentally ended in 1998, though sporadic trading continues to this day) was that it allowed for personal networks, which were thought to impede the liquidity of capital. As Chicago moved to an electronic system, the various firms of stock brokers used extensive training to prepare their workers for the change. Here, we must follow Weber (2003), in making a link between ethical and economic orders. One must note: it requires socialisation to require depersonalisation. As Simmel argues prophetically (it is 1903) “what appears here as dissociation is in reality only one of the elementary forms of socialisation” (1971:329).

It is striking the extent to which this scheme seems to follows Foucault’s account (1979) of the development of the prison. We have the development of a discursive formulation that posits the eradication of the personalised social relation and the institution of, precisely, institutional relationships (of the one-counts-for-all type). Then, just as in Foucault’s prison, the implementation of these schemes produces practices which, while emerging out of an abstracting discourse, nevertheless constitute its negation. For instance, in the Chicago pit, traders were of two types: brokers – who mediated between the pit and a bank or investment company – and locals, who played the market on their own account. Each was parasitic on the other. Zaloom (2006:100) shows how in this system a series of relationships developed that were far removed from the logic of profit. Locals would “take a loss to the benefit of the broker and his client, and in doing so, they would strengthen their relationship through reciprocity with the broker.” Furthermore, systems of status would develop that had little to do with capital and everything to do with a complex play of masks and status more reminiscent of medieval theatre: to ascend in the ranks of traders, one must constantly attempt to – physically – move up a series of steps. The first few times a neophyte dealer did this, he would be pushed off and mocked. Only after demonstrating sufficient bravery (and not necessarily profit), and enduring the requisite humiliation could the trader ascend to a higher level.

Which is to say, what the traders were doing was not simply making money. As Apparadurai sets out in The Social Life of Things (1986:3-64), money does not simply abstract, it also re-enters into local worlds of meaning and significance. To see this movement means looking beyond Jameson’s horizon when he claims that specific particularities (e.g. a culture) become capital: “commodity production is now a cultural phenomenon, in which you buy the product fully as much for its image as for its immediate use” (2000:53). While this is undeniable, what is equally true is that capital becomes cultural: becomes appropriated by local worlds. It is important to give this point its proper accent however: it is not simply that the abstract becomes concrete, but that it becomes concrete as an abstraction: capital becomes cultural only as capital; only as a non-place becomes a place even as it negates the idea of place.

III. Numbers of gesture

So far, we have only considered the physical place of the pit itself. What is important to emphasise is that this is not simply the sign of an incomplete modernisation: the phenomenology of the market is equally present in computer trading (Fig. II). This is not because computer trading is as real and situated as pit trading (though it is), but because pit trading (and indeed, social life in general) is as virtual as computer trading: the same play of potential and possibility, sculpted by habit and phenomenological placing, it at play in pit as it is on the computer screen.

Fig II. Image of the OmniTrader computer system.

So it is not just a case of noticing the presence of the physical in interaction with the computer, as Zaloom does (2006:86)[8], it is also the case of noticing that people do not simply buy derivatives in blocks of 10,000: as Mackenzie (2007) notes: “In some supposedly anonymous electronic markets, participants sometimes signal their identities by offering to buy not 10,000,000 shares, but 10,000,467, or bidding at $92,700,059: the ‘467’ or ‘59’ is like a codename.” The personal gestures of the pit are here re-expressed in an electrical market place, as particular configurations of number comes to stand in for individuals, and the sense of a place existing in a non-place is again re-established. Zaloom (2006:173) argues that the computer trader, like the unusual strategies of the pit trader, in “separating off his market self from his social self… refashions himself as a machine for trading.”

However, such an argument would simply leave us with a notion of differential modernities: the same capitalist system absorbed and changed in differing physical localities[9]: gestures would be variations on a theme.

IV. Numbers gesture

Osborne (2001:18 argues that “all non-places are places qua non-places” because even the negation of place is determinate: it is still in what was locale (what could be anywhere) that meaning is construed. This we see borne out by the traders’ behaviour: their division of work and life, the masks people wear, that Zaloom extensively documents, to hide their alienation. What this points to however, is that the distinctions of globalisation are not clear-cut, not place and non-place, or abstraction and emotion, to remember equally Simmel’s modernism. Instead, they are distinctions of structure.

Electronic trading systems, no less than the pit trading, are systems to structure perception and possibility. In the two systems just mentioned, as we have established, personal relations are intended to be abolished, and yet they reappear – in the figure of the gesture in the pit, and in the figure of the numeric gesture in the electronic trading system. But so far, these figures seem contingent: temporary moments of resistance against the narrative set up by the promise of the opening telegraph: time has been annihilated, and the future has arrived.

There is a third image to consider (Fig III.) – that of the figure of the movement of capital itself. As Herz (1998:20) argues, what needs to be put in question is just how the economy took on a life of its own in modern Western society, for a detailed consideration of Gursky’s Chicago Board of Trade II would lead us to the opposite conclusion.

Fig. III: Andreas Gursky. Chicago Board of Trade II.

The normal confusion of the stock market – a flurry of arms and tongues opaque to the outsider – is heightened by Gursky’s use of time: the image spills out waves of movement as time embeds itself into the image. Here computer banks and information screens are as uncertain and overwhelming as the gestures that surround them. Gesture is not apart from the virtual, and nor the virtual from the real[10]: given this continuity, we should not expect the possible to be effaced by capitalism[11] anymore than the possible is effaced by the actual.

That Jameson and Augé have such a strong link to Simmel in this regard is indicative of another, quieter, genealogy: that which links the conception of the individual in Simmel (a pre-given, atemporal entity) to the idea of the subject in Jameson and Augé. I want to suggest instead, in closing, a figure that shows the way a subject – indeed, a subject with particular practices and particular ideas – can emerge within capital itself.

After the move to fully electronic trading on the London International Futures and Options Exchange (LIFFE)[12], a strange figure started to be seen. In many electronic displays on derivatives market, one does not see particular offers, but merely aggregate bid/ask levels for the derivative in question (it is thought this absence of information makes it easier for traders to concentrate on the numbers). Sometimes, there is a spike in the bid/ask levels without an appreciable change in the price. This is normally thought to be someone called a “spoofer”: someone who wants to use a large quantity of bids to create the illusion that there is more demand to buy or sell than there actually is: great cache is associated to “taking him out” and returning the market to its “proper level.” However, though Zaloom (2006:226) doesn’t appreciate this, there is no logic necessity that this figure is a single person at all: it may simply be a series of bids that appear together for contingent reasons. Yet this figure is attributed subjectivity and intentionality, and the market acts as if this figure exists. It is within capital itself – as a structuring of flows of perception and memory – that one can find subjectivity, and it is this subjectivity that undermines any oppositions between abstraction and the particular, because it emphasises that movement is prior to any stoppage: any process of subjectivity.

To return to Jameson (1997:265) then, from a different path: “precisely what finance capital brings into being: a play of monetary entities that need neither production (as capital does) nor consumption (as money does), which supremely, like cyberspace, can live on their own internal metabolism, and circulate without reference to an older type of content.” This internal metabolism is correctly observed – but it is that which emerges through capital, only to negate its premises, if not its functioning.

The future never arrives: but the hands function, nonetheless; within times own annihilation, we find duration.

V. Bibliography

Antonioni, Michelangelo. 2004 [1962]. L’Eclisse. Criterion Collection: London.

Apparadurai , Arjun. 1986. Introduction: commodities and the politics of value. In, Arjun Apparadurai (ed). The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. pp.3-64.

Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Verso: London.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Bergsonism. Zone Books: New York.

Foucault, Michel. 1979. Discipline and Punish. Vintage: London

Hertz, Ellen. 1998. The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Jameson, Fredric. 2003. The End of Temporality. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 29. Summer. pp.695-718.

Jameson, Fredric. 2000. Globalization and Political Strategy. New Left Review. Vol. 4. July/August. pp. 49-68.

Jameson, Fredric. 1997. Culture and Financial Capital. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 24. No.1. pp.246-265.

Jameson, F. 1992. Postmodernism: Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso: London.

Janszen, Eric. 2008. The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow’s big crash. Harpers. February 2008. pp.39-45.

MacKenzie, Donald. 2007. Zero is a Clenched Fist. Review of Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom. London Review of Books. 1 November 2007. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n21/mack01_.html. Accessed 2/2/2008 (subscription required).

Marx, Karl. 2002. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin: London.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press: Durham & London.

Osborne, Peter. 2001. Non-places and the spaces of art. The Journal of Architecture. Vol.6. Summer. pp.183-194.

Simmel, Georg. 1971 [1903]. The Metropolis and Mental Life. In: Simmel, Georg. 1971. On Individuality and Social Forms. ed. Donald N. Levine. University of Chicago Press: Chicago. pp. 324-339.

Weber, Max 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Dover Publications: London.

Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press: Chicago & London.