The Market as an Object of Attachment: Exploring Postsocial Relations in Financial Markets

Abstract

This paper rests on the assumption of an increased presence and relevance of object worlds in the social world. It holds that this influx of object worlds coincides with changing patterns of human relatedness that can be glossed by the notion postsocial forms. Postsocial forms include object-relationships where the objects are non-human entities. One characteristic of the present situation is that perhaps for the first time in recent history it appears unclear whether other persons are, for human beings, the most fascinating part of their environment. Objects may also be the risk winners of the relationship risks which many authors find inherent in contemporary human relations. Postsocial forms "step into the place" of social relations where these empty out, where they lose some of the meaningfulness they have had in earlier periods. A condition for understanding this role of objects is that we develop, in social theory, adequate concepts of objects that break with the tradition of seeing them merely as abstract technologies that promote alienation or as fetishized commodities that freeze and numb any human or political potential (Marx). In this paper, we use a different conception developed in an earlier paper. We also explore in some detail a notion of postsocial relatedness that is based on the idea of a dynamic of wantings and lacks of fulfilment. The paper explores this framework in the area of financial markets, where traders relate to the market as an object of attachment within an environment of reiterated lacks.