The Temporalization of Financial Markets: From Network to Flow

Abstract

E ANAL YZE here several market configurations and argue that, in the course of their development, at least some markets moved from a network-based architecture to one based on a scopic mode of coordination. In networks, the mechanism of coordination is relational and selective; coordination emerges from passing things through the pipes that link the network nodes. A scopic mechanism, in contrast, works through collecting and 'appresenting' things simultaneously to a large audience of observers. The transformation from relation-seeking actors to data and narratives beamed to observers enabled a flow market to emerge that moves across time zones with the sun. The notion flow points to the streaming char­ acter of market reality and some of its consequences. The specialized life­ world of flow markets is 'metastable' in physicists' sense: it is stable only long enough to enable transactions to occur and changes with transactions. Trading media and technologies have been significant components of these architecture changes and these media and technologies also display this architecture to the public in iconic representations of financial markets. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, market 'technology' consisted of human processing, and human and even animal transmission: brokers received and noted trading interests, couriers dispatched orders and messages, pigeons carried news, dealers traded in back alleys, and all parties gossiped information. In the 21 st century, a historically unprece~ dented, integrated system of new institutional components, electronic circuits, software, hardware and systematic information processes make up global financial markets. The ticker is somewhat of a transitional object in these architectural changes. On the one hand, it sustained and continued earlier network configurations built into its operation. At the same time, it temporalized the complexity of earlier market transactions by providing First publ. in: Theory, Culture & Society 24 (2007), 7-8, pp. 116-138