The haptic visuality of financial trading

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article offers a sideways approach to analyzing market visualizations on trading screens as a part of the sensoryscapes of financial trading. Based on ethnographic research on the trading floor of a market-maker investment bank in Istanbul, I develop an anthropologically driven interdisciplinary lens built on social studies of finance (SSF) and film and media studies. Through this lens, I use ‘haptic’ (Marks, Laura U. 2000. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and Senses. Duke University Press) as a key analytic and argue that markets on screens generate a haptic visuality that shapes traders’ bodily, sensuous, affective, and emotional engagements with markets. In this way, I offer an alternative reading of Beunza and Stark’s conceptualization of pattern recognition and re-cognition by bringing it back to the works of Knorr Cetina and Bruegger. I show that traders’ aspirations, intuition, and memories take part in pattern recognition and re-cognition, transforming these experiences into subjective and embodied knowledges and practices. Hence, I expand social scientific studies on financial trading by demonstrating that intersubjective relations with anonymous market actors require self-embedding into market visualizations, through which one can engage with the faces of markets as a face that touches back to the haptic visuality of markets on screens.