READING THE TICKER TAPE IN THE LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN MARKET

Abstract

This article analyses popular accounts of financial innovations such as the stock ticker in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America. Recent social studies of finance (e.g. Preda 2009) have drawn attention to the socio-technical performative agency of such new modes of disseminating economic knowledge that do not merely provide a more accurate representation of ‘the market’ as a coherent entity but in fact help create it. However, where Preda focuses more on the modes of rational calculability and the mechanisation of trust that were encouraged by the numerical abstractions of the ticker tape and subsequent charts of the fledgling technical analysts, this article discovers a residual attraction to rhetorical forms that humanized the impersonality of the financial markets, but which, in so doing, were more in tune with occult than modern understandings of finance.