Sensing the markets: the crisis of Turkish financial markets

Abstract

This dissertation investigates everyday practices of financial trading and expertise at the intersection of market technologies, intersubjective relations on the trading floors, and the volatile aftermath of the failed military coup in 2016 in Turkey. Inspired by Ann Cvetkovich, I ask: How does capitalism feel at the very heart of capitalism, that is, on the trading floors? I build an anthropologically informed interdisciplinary lens based on affect theory, film and media studies, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, and use “affect” as a key analytic and site of the dissertation. I argue that traders’ interactions with financial markets are not simply taken-for-granted, mediating action between an unmarked user and replicable, conventionalized technologies. Instead, I show that these interactions are entangled with memories, other humans, technologies, and conditions. Traders’ engagements with markets do not exist in a bubble. Therefore, I use the socially, politically, and economically precarious aftermath of the failed coup, where the AKP government’s ideological pressure on the Turkish Central Bank caused traders to reconsider the mechanisms of the supposedly open and neoliberal Turkish economy and question the norms and ideals of finance, as a critical window into analyzing financial trading and expertise as being shaped not so much by seemingly universal, calculative agencies and technologies but rather by senses, imaginations, and embodied entanglements. I demonstrate that practices of financial trading and expertise are not atomistic and rational. Rather, it emerges from the collective that emerges from the dynamics on the trading floors and institutional, organizational, and political frameworks and ideologies of finance. Hence, Sensing the Markets: The Crisis of Turkish Financial Markets offers a conceptually and methodologically novel approach to the social scientific studies of finance, demonstrating that analyzing global mechanisms of finance capitalism, which are in constant flux and friction, requires an ethnographic methodology and writing that is similarly open to confusion, excess, and affective attunements.