Difference between revisions of "The Market"

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Whereas the built environment brought countless aspects of human activity into existence by anchoring them in physical space, what Venturi exposed was the cultural appropriation of semiotic systems to designate spaces whose distinctive architecture had not yet been invented.  In his iconic “Recommendation for a monument” his sarcastic suggestion that decoration upon generic form was the most ethical and economic method of design, exposed the complete lack of subtlety in designs that managed to serve specific functions in the absence of architectural innovation.  Rather than create a home for new human activity, it was clear that one need only name a space in order for it to serve a specific function.  Although modular, multipurpose, space had been realized long ago behind the glass curtain walls of modern skyscapers, after 1972, one could not escape the vulgar conclusion that the space itself was a nostalgic theatre enabling the suspension of disbelief which designated the offices of one box from the warehouse or monument of another.
 
Whereas the built environment brought countless aspects of human activity into existence by anchoring them in physical space, what Venturi exposed was the cultural appropriation of semiotic systems to designate spaces whose distinctive architecture had not yet been invented.  In his iconic “Recommendation for a monument” his sarcastic suggestion that decoration upon generic form was the most ethical and economic method of design, exposed the complete lack of subtlety in designs that managed to serve specific functions in the absence of architectural innovation.  Rather than create a home for new human activity, it was clear that one need only name a space in order for it to serve a specific function.  Although modular, multipurpose, space had been realized long ago behind the glass curtain walls of modern skyscapers, after 1972, one could not escape the vulgar conclusion that the space itself was a nostalgic theatre enabling the suspension of disbelief which designated the offices of one box from the warehouse or monument of another.
  
In essence, symbolism had invaded space rendering residual communicative modalities in architectural form (the steeple, the column, the storefront) which directed activities within them unnecessary.  In a traditional town one might recognize a church by a steeple, and civic institutions by classical architecture – but in Las Vegas one needed only to read a sign that read “CHAPEL” and a marriage could be performed.  Resistance to the glass curtain and the modernist box need not be overcome by a radical re-education of a public in modernist aesthetics, but by the complete removal of ambiguity through the ultimate abstraction of the sign.  Buildings had entered a realm of mediation, and the Las Vegas strip presented an intermediate phenomenon whereby one could could navigate a foreign landscape locate a desired place.   
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In essence, symbolism had invaded space rendering residual communicative modalities in architectural form (the steeple, the column, the storefront) which directed activities within them unnecessary.  In a traditional town one might recognize a church by a steeple, and civic institutions by classical architecture – but in Las Vegas one needed only to read a sign that read “CHAPEL” and a marriage could be performed.  Resistance to the glass curtain and the modernist box need not be overcome by a radical re-education of a public in modernist aesthetics, but by the complete removal of ambiguity through the ultimate abstraction of the sign.  Buildings had entered a realm of mediation, and the Las Vegas strip presented an intermediate phenomenon whereby one could could navigate a foreign landscape and locate a desired service or commodity in spite of all unfamiliarity with the landscape itself.   
  
 
Venturi's Monument, like a Vegas chapel, anticipates the remediation of spatial phenomena in immaterial spaces and illustrates that function itself is not material, but something performed by actors engaged in a collective fiction.  Once it was plainly clear that all the world was a stage, it followed that with the proper, scripting, semiotic device, the market no longer needed to be a specific locality in order to function as a market.
 
Venturi's Monument, like a Vegas chapel, anticipates the remediation of spatial phenomena in immaterial spaces and illustrates that function itself is not material, but something performed by actors engaged in a collective fiction.  Once it was plainly clear that all the world was a stage, it followed that with the proper, scripting, semiotic device, the market no longer needed to be a specific locality in order to function as a market.
 
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= Market as Stage: A comparison of three Stock Markets=
 
= Market as Stage: A comparison of three Stock Markets=
  

Revision as of 22:25, 15 April 2008

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In this dossier's engagement with the intersection of the built and mediated environment, we interpret Marshall Mcluhan's argument that the remediation process whereby one medium survives as the content of another is the preservation of a distinct function in the midst of informatic and material transformation. This is not to suggest any predetermined trajectory of cultural obsolescence whereby a pre-existing function is stripped of cultural obstacles in its way, but rather to note that, in hindsight, content's transformative mechanism of appropriation enables us to examine behavioral systems, and the environment that housed them, as dead media, and that such dead media provide insights into a story of the concentration and distillation of culture into the symbolic content of later media which house cultural remains.

Within the larger discussion of critical techniques this Archive attempts to employ, this dossier might also best be understood as an attempt to bridge our understanding of the isolation of medium from message (in the hermes model) with our understanding of the communicative properties of materials which exhibit no such fragmentation (in the iris model), as well as the rhizomatic, independent, message function that, in its ubiquitous employabilty, conforms to no specific medium (the furies model). Far from suggesting an evolutionary hierarchy towards the immaterial, the market may, however, provide deeper insights into our understanding of the remediating processes at work in each of the three.

We trace the process whereby the concentration of trading behavior and its eventual standardization was enabled by its enclosure in the space of the market, and the processes whereby this concentration separated market activity from a distinct built environment, isolating a function which is non-physical and anticipates the remediation of the market in the scripting content of immaterial spaces. Although we make no attempt to argue that physical market sites no longer exist, we do attempt to expose the informatic and material shifts that have obsolesced such physical environments, rendering the built environments that remain stages which serve a social function that is, in itself, a commodity. Although we attempt to identify the legacy of this fragmentation in the built environment and in the spaces which now bear witness to the market function in unexpected forms, we hope that future contributions will enrich and complicate the conceptual and mediatic transformations that accompanied the resurrection of symbolism in architecture.

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What was once a spatial locality with a distinct form and use is now pure function with no distinct materiality
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Theatricality in the creation of a consuming subject

Although there is much disagreement as to when consumer culture emerged fully formed, it is clear that the social transformation that accompanied its arrival required an unprecedented effort to pursuade individuals to consume as a way of life. The combined forces of advertising, branding and strategic exhibition of foreign objects, colluded in an elaborate performance which sought to embed curiosity in consuming subjects eager to witness the magic of a marketplace disrupting traditional social fabric. Although

Mail-order

Semiotics in the Liberation of Function from Form

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Robert Venturi's "Recommendation for a monument" from Learning From Las Vegas, 1972


... ours is not the environment for heroic communication through pure architecture. Each medium has its day, and the rhetorical environmental statements of our time – civic, commercial, or residential – will come from media more purely symbolic, perhaps less static and more adaptable to the scale of our environment. The iconography and mixed media of roadside commercial architecture will point the way if we will look. Housing for the elderly on the Oak Street Connector, if it had to be a monument, would have been more economical, socially responsible and amenable as a conventional apartment building,lost by the side of the expressway, with a big sign on top blinking, I AM A MONUMENT. Decoration is cheaper.

- Robert Venturi,"Learning From Las Vegas," 1972



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The Upper Strip Looking North
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A Vegas chapel: function legitimated through semiotics

When Robert Venturi looked to the vernacular architecture on the Las Vegas strip in the late 1960's, he saw a resurrection of symbolism in the built environment that had seemed destined for extinction in the wake of architectural modernism. Whereas the Bauhaus' legacy in modernism had stripped buildings of ornament in an attempt to unify form with function, Venturi was amazed to find a Las Vegas strip dotted with generic buildings differentiated only by elaborate ornamental signs designating the unique functions and identities of otherwise identical spaces.

The Vegas strip not only violated a progression away from decoration (which led many to credit Venturi's text as the first postmodern architectural manifesto) but brought more clearly into focus the impact of the automobile upon architecture that needed to be identified from greater distances over shorter durations of time. Whereas the heroic communication of pure architecture had in the past led to forms and facades which - albeit imperfectly - communicated the activities contained within them, Venturi noted that in a land of highways and commercial strips the same system of (road) signs that enabled standardized navigation of an entire continent also enabled a faster recognition of the buildings and spaces one passed by. The vital necessity of introducing semiotic distinctions between buildings exemplified the spatial distortions that accompany accelerated movement and the distribution of communities across expanding territories.

Whereas the built environment brought countless aspects of human activity into existence by anchoring them in physical space, what Venturi exposed was the cultural appropriation of semiotic systems to designate spaces whose distinctive architecture had not yet been invented. In his iconic “Recommendation for a monument” his sarcastic suggestion that decoration upon generic form was the most ethical and economic method of design, exposed the complete lack of subtlety in designs that managed to serve specific functions in the absence of architectural innovation. Rather than create a home for new human activity, it was clear that one need only name a space in order for it to serve a specific function. Although modular, multipurpose, space had been realized long ago behind the glass curtain walls of modern skyscapers, after 1972, one could not escape the vulgar conclusion that the space itself was a nostalgic theatre enabling the suspension of disbelief which designated the offices of one box from the warehouse or monument of another.

In essence, symbolism had invaded space rendering residual communicative modalities in architectural form (the steeple, the column, the storefront) which directed activities within them unnecessary. In a traditional town one might recognize a church by a steeple, and civic institutions by classical architecture – but in Las Vegas one needed only to read a sign that read “CHAPEL” and a marriage could be performed. Resistance to the glass curtain and the modernist box need not be overcome by a radical re-education of a public in modernist aesthetics, but by the complete removal of ambiguity through the ultimate abstraction of the sign. Buildings had entered a realm of mediation, and the Las Vegas strip presented an intermediate phenomenon whereby one could could navigate a foreign landscape and locate a desired service or commodity in spite of all unfamiliarity with the landscape itself.

Venturi's Monument, like a Vegas chapel, anticipates the remediation of spatial phenomena in immaterial spaces and illustrates that function itself is not material, but something performed by actors engaged in a collective fiction. Once it was plainly clear that all the world was a stage, it followed that with the proper, scripting, semiotic device, the market no longer needed to be a specific locality in order to function as a market.


Market as Stage: A comparison of three Stock Markets

NASDAQ

On February 8, 1971, a year prior to Venturi's publication of "Learning From Las Vegas," the world witnessed the birth of the first purely electronic stock market, NASDAQ. In contrast to traditional stock markets, NASDAQ's elimination of a trading floor helped to minimize the spread between the bid price and the ask price of a stock through it's computer bulletin board system. Although the market initially did not connect buyers and sellers directly, it presented a successor to over-the-counter finance and introduced a market function that did not depend on person to person trade. NASDAQ initially relied upon the use of telephones to connect buyers, brokers and sellers, yet currently relies upon electronic communication networks. As the world's largest stock market, in terms of companies listed and trades per day, NASDAQ is a functioning market without the spatial enclosure of a market, a product of the information age, and a phenomenon which illuminates the theatrical gestures elsewhere to preserve and exhibit a non-essential spatiality.

The New York Stock Exchange - Theatrical adherence to an obsolescent culture

Although the New York Stock exchange no longer engages in over-the-counter trading, its trading floor is a bustling theatre of trading activity. The floor itself might be seen as an obsolescent inefficiency, yet it is worth noting that in dollar volume, the NYSE remains a larger market than the NASDAQ despite having less listings. The NYSE is called a hybrid market because customers are given the choice of whether to send orders for immediate electronic execution or whether to submit an order to the trading floor for trading in the auction market. The preservation of human interaction on the floor itself seems to embody a nostalgia inherent in "the cake mix effect" whereby the efficiency of a sequence is interrupted by redundant steps as a defense from the obsolescence of a sequence understood to have cultural value. The floor is a tradition that is alive and well, yet this phenomenon eludes the mere prerequisite of market function, effectively defending a culture whose continued presence preserves an illusion that the market is still a market.


The Shanghai Stock Exchange

In perhaps the most bizarre isolation of medium from message at a time when the space of a trading floor is obsolescent, the Shanghai Stock Exchange, though entirely electronic like NASDAQ, has a trading floor which serves no market function in performance or otherwise. As a relatively new market, the physicality of a trading floor lends authority to the electronic transactions which occur in reference to it, yet it simultaneously sits as the vacant theatre of a performance which never took place. Whereas the NYSE might be understood as a monument to trading which lays claim to cultural capital and ensures continued longevity, the Shanghai Stock Exchange physical existence seems in contrast to be legitimizing a market dependent upon foreign investors that equate the physical market with a "real" market worthy of investment. The market extends Robert Venturi's visual joke into unexpected territory, announcing "I AM A MARKET" in spite of foreign anxieties which might argue otherwise.

The Market as an Object

This section will look at how the market as an object was subsumed by "the economy," following Timothy Mitchell's argument in his article, "Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century". Mitchell argues that the objectification of the market and the economy is accomplished by economic, econometric, and governmental attempts to keep track of monetary exchange. In other words, measurements of the market serve to constitute the object they seek to measure (Mitchell 2005). Following Mitchell's argument and drawing from Randy Martin's book, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, we propose that the death of the market as a media object was accomplished by the same process that made it; measurements of market activity become the condition of possibility for this activity in such a way that measuring and regulatory acts become immanent to actual commodities. Commodities now no longer need the frame of the market to act as a structure, providing the affordances and prohibitions of exchange. Now these regulatory/technical capacities are embedded in commodities such as derivatives and securities, as Randy Martin demonstrates.

The Market as an Organic Body

Further, in Braudel's definition of the market, his use of the term "economic life" implies that economic activity is alive, or that it is a site where life happens. Timothy Mitchell finds that dominant ideas of the market before the 1930s treated it as an aggregate of life forces, or "individual utilities" (Mitchell 2005, 129). "The object of analysis was made up of forces, conceived as individual utilities, that were assumed to be in balance. The site of this mechanical equilibrium was 'the market'.... As a neutral, planar surface, the market of neoclassical economics had no depth, no dynamic structure, no forces of its own, no 'macro' dimension that could be described apart from the individual utilities that moved across it. It was an inert, unmoving space" (Mitchell 2005, 129).

External regulation v. internal/immanent

Mitchell, Markets, 1-2: "Markets would not work if people were not allowed to exclude things, to leave certain costs or claims out of the calculation, and to deny responsibility for certain consequences. Economic analysis helps organize these exclusions, helps distinguish what can count in the act of exchange from what cannot, what must be paid for and what should not. From this perspective, economics should be analyzed not in terms of the reality it represents (or fails to represent), but in terms of the arrangements and exclusions it helps to produce."

Mitchell, Markets, 3: "Enframing a market does not happen only by employing the methods of classification or calculation that economic theory may provide. The exclusions on which market transactions depend take a variety of forms, and acquire different degrees of force and effectiveness."

Mitchell, Markets, 5-6: "Despite the porosity of such arrangements, the idea persists that the market, indeed capitalism in general, has a boundary. The boundary is thought to separate the market from the large areas of material activity and resources that seem to exist beyond its limit. For countries outside the West, the idea of a boundary provides a common way not just to think about these places but to diagnose their problems and design appropriate remedies. Such remedies are increasingly popular. Older ways of approaching non-western development typically referred to different sectors of the economy, such as the traditional and the modern, the rural and the urban, or the agrarian and the industrial. These sectors had moving and sometimes overlapping boundaries. Development could be planned as a series of transitions, in which people and resources were to be moved from one sector to another, or in which the expansion of the market transformed different parts of the economy at different moments. Since the changes occurred over time, the difference between the non-market and the market, or the non-capitalist and the capitalist, represented as much a temporal transition as a territorial one. Today those sorts of temporal-spatial understandings often appear to have been displaced by a much simpler set of proposals: the capitalist economy is surrounded by a boundary, outside which stands the non-capitalist, non-market world. The task of development economics is to help extend the rules of the market into these other spaces."

THE LINE DEMARCATING CAPITALISM IS THE TERRAIN OF CAPITALISM, Mitchel, Markets, 7: "the distinction between market and non-market or capitalist and non-capitalist should be considered not as a thin line but as a broad terrain, in fact a frontier region that covers the entire territory of what is called capitalism."

ECONOMICS CONTROLS REPRESENTATIONS: Mitchel, Markets, 7: "...in describing what this nonmarket world lacks, neoclassical economics tends to diagnose its defects as an absence of techniques of representation. Things are stuck outside the market because they are not properly represented-- by property records, prices, or other systems of reference. What economic analysis does, however, is not to represent what was previously unrepresented, but to try and reorganize the circulation and control of representations."

The Market as a Medium

To what extent can the market be characterized as a medium? And, insofar as it is a medium, to what extent can the market be characterized as a dead medium?

In order to answer these questions, one must consider different definitions and uses of the word, market. Fernand Braudel defines the market as that which mediates between material life and economic life. This understanding is obsolete because the possibility of mediation requires a prior separation between the two entities--in this case material and economic life--being mediated. A Marxist reading of capitalism, especially as it was taken up by Michel Foucault in his concept of biopolitics, suggests that material and economic life are no longer separate, that the economy has become a condition of possibility for material life, and is therefore immanent to it. The market as a medium in this regard is dead.

The market can refer to a physical place where commodities are exchanged, as in a marketplace, but it is also a conceptual category used to characterize the aggregate of economic exchange in a given totality, such as "the U.S. market," or of any specific commodity, such as "the housing market".

The market as a site of buying and selling: To the extent that the market is understood to be a spatial entity, or object, containing/enclosing acts of economic exchange, the market is dead.

Market as a conceptual category referring to a specific type of commodity that can be bought and sold (i.e., the job market, the stock market). The stipulation is that there has to be more than one seller offering the commodity to at least one buyer. The sellers exist in a market competing for the buyers, who can choose between them. [Is competition alive or dead? Is there any such thing as a "free market"?]

The Economy as a Represented Object

Timothy Mitchell talks about the economy as an object, an entity, that was constructed by studies of it and attempts to regulate it. This process of regulation sounds like it should be outside of economic activity, but he is saying that it constitutes economic activity. The economy is an object of economics, econometrics, government regulation, etc. In other words, it is an object of calculation and restriction.

In the 1930s the term "the economy" began to represent an economic whole that included and coordinated markets into one coherent system, delineated by national boundaries.Mitchell, Economists, 126: Mitchell argues that, "...the economy became the object of economic knowledge only quite recently. Not until the 1930s did economists begin to write about an object called the economy, and only by the middle of the century was the term as it is understood today in general use. Second, 'economy' was not just a new word for an existing sphere or underlying substance; its arrival marked the emergence of novel forms of sociotechnical practice that formed and performed the economy as a new object of professional knowledge and political practice."

Modes of Representation

A capitalist market needs to have what Timothy Mitchell calls an "apparatus of representation" in order to convert material into abstract capital. Mitchell, Markets, 9: Characterizing de Soto's argument: "The most important difference between successful capitalist economies and the rest of the world lies not in the wealth they possess... but in how that wealth is held." "Representations of material goods transform their value into abstract forms, which can live an 'invisible, parallel life' alongside their physical existnece. The West has invented procedures to create these invisible forms. Individuals in the West can unlock the assets accumulated in physical property, transforming material wealth into abstract capital" (Mitchell, 2006, 9).

Spatial Representation

The purpose of any space is determined by both the symbols used to designate where one is (ie an open for business sign), and the practices that take place there. In "Learning From Las Vegas," Robert Venturi takes a close look at how the Vegas Strip (in the late 60's) consisted of buildings that were differentiated primarily by flashy signs decorating unoriginal buildings (what he called the "decorated shed." He traced the phenomenon to the impact of speed on architecture - mainly that in a landscape where one drives past buildings, signs enable one to differentiate one space from another at a faster speed than differentiated architectures could (which is why signs matter so much for businesses on highways).

What makes this so interesting is that when semiotics are reintroduced into architecture, communicating the specific use of a generic space, buildings enter a mediated realm - And I think that's key here - that when people believe they're in a market when they see a "market" sign, it enables the use of a spatial semiotic to successfully mediate the entire space provided that the same activity occurs - which is really just to say that the Las Vegas strip is this intermediate phenomenon whereby we all can find what we want in foreign places, and that's precisely the mechanism by which we can create a market without the actual space of a market (a shopping cart icon does the trick!).

New Forms

The market is traditionally understood to be free in its essence, but subject to external regulation. The notion of the free market is associated with natural life, or life-itself; it is seen as an organic social mode of exchange. In fact, it sort of was at first, but this is dead. Now regulation is embedded in the actual commodities. Capital flows, risks, and price fluctuations, are all coded, rather than the objects. The market as an object, a separate sphere, is dead. It is not life being confined in a space and regulated from the outside; it is rather a collapsing of technical conditions and energy. No longer about matter. No longer about material commodities used by a body.


From Citizen to Private Investor

Personalized Advertising

The Death of Equilibrium/Equilibrium as Death

Randy Martin looks at U.S.'s switch from creditor to debtor nation in the 1980s. Consumption without production. Risk becomes a sign of strength and power and security a sign of weakness (Martin, 28). Then debt gets repackaged as securities. Went off gold standard. "Now monetary movement was being freed to spread the wealth. Equilibrium-- key to Bretton Woods and early monetarist currency controls-- was no longer a condition of exchange. The dollar's spread, the expansion of debt and speculation, fostered disequilibrium and its attendant risks as a new horizon of opportunity. Fixing exchange to a physical standard perpetuated the image of the economy as a closed system. It could grow in proportion to the balance of inputs and outputs" (Martin, 29).

The organic model of the economy as a closed system: "An economy could become overheated and melt down or explode. The social sciences more generally were predicated on this image of a closed system. The system adapted to internal strains by growth and differentiation. It maintained boundaries, kept out threatening uncertainties, and externalized unintended consequences from its internal decisions" (Martin, 28-29).

"As financial reason overtook the system-based moral and political economy, as the investor who knows no country elbowed out the consumer-citizen of the nation-state, the organic closed system, result of the social sciences' unacknowledged metaphorizing of the social, was morphing into a different kind of beast" (Martin, 29).

Futurity in the Present

Branding: "In its infinite differentiation of product ranges, branding plays with a combination of familiarity plus novelty, a past-futurity. New memories installed that you have not phenomenologically experienced in order to produce a certain receptivity to brand triggers" (Parisi and Goodman, 2006).

Coding of Risk, Instability

How to understand market activity after the traditional market dies. Instead of coding commodities as valuable (Mitchell, 2007), Randy Martin argues that capitalism is following a financial logic, which extracts value from predicting future price fluctuations, interest rates, exchange rates, and packages this risk into new kinds of commodities, such as derivatives and securities.

"Properly ascertained risk, not growth per se, is what yields rewards. The trade in risk avoidance devolves into a profit on risk itself" (Martin, 33).

Derivatives

A derivative is a contract on "some variation in price" (Martin, 31). EXAMPLE: "a firm selling a product overseas that will not be deliverable for several years will create a contract to fix currency exchange rates for the time when the product is finished. The expected difference between current and future exchange rates can then be sold as a separate commodity" (Martin, 31). "A similar contract could hedge against a change in interest rates, or the price of raw materials, or delivery costs" (Martin, 31).


"Derivatives remove reference from the commodity. They allow debt to serve as a productive medium from which countless commodities can be spawned. Derivatives are promissory notes issued between firms. They represent a prime vehicle with which industrial corporations undertake the function of banks by engaging in financial services." (Martin, 31)

"The derivative is a sign of the shift in the beneficiaries of development from populations or nations to other economic actors. Those who can steward risk will advance....The capacity for financial decision making trumps democratic involvement to decide political representation" (Martin, 31).

Securities

References

Clough, Patricia, et. al. Notes Towards a Theory of Affect Itself.

Martin, Randy. 2007. And Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Massumi, Brian. The Future Birth of the Affective Fact. DATE JOURNAL

Mitchell, Timothy. 2005. Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and its Epistemological Others, edited by George Steinmetz.

Mitchell, Timothy. [From an early version of the following paper.] 2007. The Properties of Markets. Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics. Edited by Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu. Princeton: Princeton University Press.