5 Emotions on the Trading Floor: Social and Symbolic Expressions

JEAN-PIERRE HASSOUN

Introduction

In The Passions and the Interests (1977), Albert O. Hirschman surveyed the his­tory of ideas in an effort to understand how lucrative activities such as com­merce, banking, and speculation could, at different times in the same places, be either stigmatized and counted among the worst social defects, such as greed and avarice, or become legitimate, and ultimately come to stand as behavior models. In his view, this long evolution of ideas crystallized around the para­digmatic opposition between passions and interests. Thinkers as diverse as Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Montesquieu, Vico, Hobbes, Adam Smith, Max Weber, and though only alluded to, Freud, dissected human nature to find answers to the question of how to handle the harmful passions, of which greed was one of the most recur­rent manifestations. Should such passions be censored or repressed? Should the passions be allowed to play themselves against each other, thereby canceling each other out? Should they instead be channeled, sublimated, used, even val­ued and praised? The question runs all through Western thought, concerned as it has been to reconcile ‘moral’ imperatives generally rooted in Christian tradition with the imperatives of economic development.

But if we change the focus, leaving aside ideas understood as guides to human action during a given period and conceiving the market act as what I will call a ‘total market action’ occurring within a specific institutional arrangement that has its own social dynamic and time frame, the moral and normative paradigms assumed to legitimate the field of economic activity come to seem rather abstract. What reason is there to think that in action the passions fade away, yielding to cold calculation and control? Do passion- fueled emotions become ‘disenchanted’ in that, as we understand it, the ultimate function and goal of the passions is rational? Are they destined to

Translation by Amy Jacobs. I first touched on the subject of this chapter at a conference of the Social Studies of Finance Association (SSFA), 17 May 2002, entitled ‘Paris, place financiered My thanks to Marie Buscatto, Jerome Gautie, Karin Knorr, Paul Lagneau-Ymonet, Alex Preda, and Florence Weber for their comments on previous versions of this text.

be ‘instrumentalized’ in the service of higher moral and collective interests? The concept of a ‘metamorphosis’ of the passions seems to partake more of an opaque moral, even transcendental alchemy than of analysis in terms of social uses and symbolic issues? As I see it, while these ideas may refer to an ideolog­ical and normative transformation that occurred within the history of ideas, they diminish or leave unexplored the social mechanisms by which it is possi­ble to manage the passions in action, rather than transform them.

My purpose here is to take up the classic question of relations between passions and interests without being boxed into a paradigmatic opposition between the two terms and without giving privilege of place to the idea that passions are transformed into interests.

Rather than ‘dissect the human soul’ atopically, I propose to examine the problem from a vantage point firmly anchored in both place and time: the financial market trading floor during intense moments of market action and the intense emotions such action causes and brings to the surface.

Market Emotions

I define market emotions as those moments in market activity when increased intensity in trading activity provokes intense affective states characterized by (1) physical and mental disturbance or excitement and (2) the individual production of metaphors that fleetingly transfigure the relation of market actor to market activity. In contrast to the usual definition of emotion, I do not establish a correlation between emotion and disturbance or abolition of appropriate reactions for adapting to events. On the contrary, I am interested in situational emotion within the market process and in how that emotion is expressed by market actors.

Studies of financial trading floors have focused on the physical morpho­logy of ‘the crowd’ and its effects on volatility (Baker 1984a, b), the ambiguit­ies of trader behavior (Marks 1988), the effects of computerization on the physical market (Jorion 1994), and relations among market strategies, insti­tutional frameworks, and social norms (Abolafia 1996, 1998; Hassoun 2000a,

2002)    . While these authors agree that such markets constitute oversocialized worlds, they have not studied the human passions expressed in them as a research object. It is true that emotions are of marginal interest to economic theory, and when they are taken into account, the focus tends to be exclus­ively on their possible effects on individual behavior (Elster 1998). In theo­retical thinking on financial markets, ‘emotional reactions’ are most often associated with investors’ ‘irrational exuberance’, a notion used to explain how speculative bubbles happen (Shiller 2001).

And yet anyone who has directly observed financial market actors knows that emotions and their verbal and physical expression are a daily part of these activities. I had repeated opportunities to realize this during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted (1997-8) at the Palais Brongniart, site of the Paris Stock Exchange or Bourse. In addition to daily observation, I spoke with approximately fifty persons, all present and officially working there, in both formal recorded interviews and ordinary conversation. I also regularly spent time with some in the Palais de la Bourse cafeteria, and lunched with them sev­eral times in nearby restaurants. After the markets were computerized in May 1998 (see Godechot, Hassoun, and Muniesa 2000), I remained in contact with approximately twenty professionals, thereby collecting retrospective views on this development. Given that language was one of the ‘pillars’ of open-outcry trading-floor activity, somewhat as networks, mathematical formulas, and computers are of electronic financial markets (Beunza and Stark 2004, Chapter 4, this volume), actors’ accounts and vocabulary occupy an important place in this article.¹

Emotions on the trading floor are to be read first of all on faces, where strong tension and concentration may be perceived, but also at those moments when facial muscles, and the body with them, suddenly go loose. Emotions are perceptible in the interaction rites of a place where physical proximity dominates (Hassoun 2000&); they are on daily display in the form of angry verbal outbursts, shoving, friendly, ambiguous, or aggressive back- slapping, complicitous hand taps, hateful or empathetic looks, yelling, swear­ing, and insults. Financial market actors’ behavior openly expresses such varied emotions as sympathy, admiration, anger, aggressiveness, feelings of rivalry, shame, and humiliation. And generally, these emotional phenomena are fully verbalized, either at the moment the feelings are felt, or in the dis­cussion and reminiscing that fuel daily life in these places, which, whatever else they are, are places of work.

Before considering more closely the contexts in which such emotions emerge, it is useful to specify the different types of market actors exposed to feeling them.

Brokers regularly employed by Bourse brokerage firms execute buying and selling orders for off-the-floor clients, but they also develop sophisticated know-how for attaining their ends and in this sense are directly involved in the market performance.

Brokers also engage in spieling (from German ‘game to play’) with the firm’s compte maison (house account); that is, buying and selling with the firm’s money independently of client orders. All spieling profits are divided up as bonuses among employees on the relevant trader team. The compte maison can of course show a negative balance (in which case it is called the compte erreur) from losses due to trading errors, disputes among traders, or losing spiels, all potential sources of what I am calling market emotions since, even though personal funds are not at stake, spieling involves hope of gain in the form of bonuses.

Independent floor traders (IFT) were established by the Marche a Terme International de France, Societe Anonyme (Matif SA) to create liquidity.²

IFTs sometimes called speculators, work for themselves and generally act as ‘scalpers’, initiating positions that they then ‘turn around’ as quickly as possi­ble for immediate profit.³ They risk their own money, along with their profes­sional existence since they can ‘get blown off’ the market at any moment.

Boxemen provide live ‘market commentary’ by telephone to the desks; flashers gesture information between traders and boxemen. Couriers run in all directions transmitting time-stamped orders to computer operators for registration. Employees in these categories are also fully exposed to market emotions through their participation in collective performances and the gen­eral hub-bub and excitement.

The intensity and frequency of emotion are of course unequally distrib­uted among these groups, but to construct the research object it seems rea­sonable to adopt a transversal perspective rather than emphasizing social or functional differentiation. Observation, interviews, and conversations all sug­gest that market action—buying and selling, winning and losing—is likely to produce emotions among those who engage in it, whatever their occupational status or financial means.

Though market emotion is never fully disconnected from monetary gain or loss, this directly utilitarian relation hardly exhausts the phenomenon. Here I wish to explore its other component—the passions—without effacing or neglecting the question of financial profit or loss, i.e. interests.

A Typology of Market Emotions and Their Social Effects Performance and Competition

The emotional phenomena discussed here can only be approached sociologic­ally if we are careful not to dissociate what causes the emotion from what the emotion itself may bring about in the immediate social environment. The following interview excerpts provide a means of examining the connections between situations in which emotions are experienced and the effects of those emotions on local social surroundings.

One day I bought 5600 contracts in one hour. For the same client. He’s THE client, you use the formal with him.. .I once sold 4000 contracts with him, another time 4800; once I bought 3000. But [that one] was the biggest [trade] I’ve done... You’ve got everybody watching you, they can’t believe their eyes. And it was unbelievable— you’d’ve thought we were on the Notionnel.⁴ In the space of a minute he’s going, ‘Buy 200’, ‘You got it!’ ‘Buy 300’, ‘I’ll give ya 200!’. The NIPs were staring at us, it showed up on the CAC⁵ —we were creatures from outerspace, there’s no other word for it. (Head of a trader team)

Keep in mind that the CAC [Futures] record is 73 000 contracts in one day. Once, at the Sirap, we did 43 000 contracts on the CAC in a single day. We were way over 50% [of pit volume]—we were the kings of the universe! There was nobody but us. You couldn’t do a trade without going to see the Sirap—impossible! I was all over the place. In all the commentaries it was ‘Sirap, Sirap’ all day long. That evening all

the boxemen came to me saying, ‘What a hard-on you musta had!’ (Head of a

boxemen team)

The emotions here narrated were produced by accomplishing a trading performance that consists, in the case of a broker-client relation, of buying or selling a high number of contracts at the rate the client demands, or, for independent traders, selling or getting extraordinarily high volumes of orders. This type of performance is measured in comparison to either a single deal or a trading day and may be either individual or collective. It can take the form of a ‘record’, and thus shows that market activity involves internal­ized social experience that produces local memory disconnected from eco­nomic functions and goals, since thinking of number of contracts sold in a day as a record creates a symbolic function that then coexists with the eco­nomic goal implied in thinking of each trade as separate from all others.

This type of emotion has multiple social meanings and effects. It can bring about territorial polarization: ‘You’ve got everybody watching you’, ‘I was all over the place; In all the commentaries’, ‘way over 50%’. It allows for explic­itly establishing a symbolic hierarchy among the different exchanges operat­ing at the Palais de la Bourse: ‘You’d’ve thought we were on the Notionnel’. It reflects and intensifies competition between the different status groups (‘The NIPs were staring at us’), and it underlines the social feeling of having had an exceptional experience (‘we were creatures from outer space’).

Territorialization, competition, exceptional experience all work together to infuse actors with the feeling they are participating in a contest:

The biggest moment I think, or that I remember, was when interests rates were changed in ’93 ... We were at around 130 on the Notionnel and had an order to sell a block of 1000 contracts every 5 centimes. No one saw me move, and we sold 25 or 30 000 contracts in under three hours. I’d say we really made the market that day—we brought it down two points... It was a massacre, it went from 130 to 115. At closing I didn’t even know my name... When you’ve lived through that, you’re almost a vet­eran, you relativize, 4 points doesn’t seem like such a big deal anymore... You sweat all over the place saying it can’t be true, and it wears you out a little, but those are good memories—real moments. (Desk sales, in touch with the floor)

The competition here is among contestants struggling against each other to find the desired buyer or seller, to be the fastest to find a buyer or seller, to move at the right moment (‘no one saw me move’). But these same contest­ants will come together immediately afterward as complementary parties to strike the next deal. The competitive relations uniting exchange members are paradoxical, involving both market competition and market alliance. And their twofold nature goes together with an informal symbolic struggle among, on the one hand, individuals following largely male norms and holding largely male values which are only strengthened by working in a place from which women are virtually absent, and on the other, the various Bourse brokerage firms, whose names, like the colors of the jackets worn by their brokers, are coded in terms of prestige. The twofold symbolic competition is accentuated by the fact that the trading floors are also labor markets where one can change employers easily, thereby converting accumulated prestige into supplementary financial income. But once again, prestige accumulation can never be conceived exclusively in terms of monetary convertibility. It must be seen in relation to professional self-valuing, in turn heightened by this type of emotion. Emotion is an active principle in the hands-on, in-the- pit professional self-construction process.

The emotions provoked by successful ‘performance’, and the accounts of those emotions, recall the ‘cult of performance’ described by Alain Ehrenberg (1991) at a much broader social scale with regard to ‘extreme sports’ (bungie-jumping, car and motorcycle racing, etc.). In France, people began practising such sports at the same time the financial markets were taking off, and some trading-floor actors I met did extreme sports on the weekend or during vacation.

More generally, this type of emotion partakes in the social fabric of open- outcry markets, contributing to actors’ on-the-job internalization of a few specific social principles: the pit is a territory; the different futures markets are hierarchically ordered; the activity involves the staging of a social, inter- and intraprofessional contest; prestige should be accumulated to develop professional renown.

Violence

Emotions can also arise following abrupt, violent market movements that accentuate the uncertainty consubstantial with these activities; and in response to events external to the trading floor that upset market equilib­rium: wars, conflicts, or political decisions.

The Gulf War was hell... the most torrid, turn-on moments I’ve ever known on the Bourse, the headiest, the most destructive, too. We were at the farthest extremes... I’m amazed that not everyone tells you about it because we and everybody’s still talking about it today... For us it’s THE reference. In terms of activity, the market exploded. It could lose 150 points, then lose them again in another 20 minutes. It was going every which way. One day you lost 30 000 francs, the next you made 40 000.⁶ You were always in the air, you didn’t know your own name. August 2, Iraqi troops enter Kuwait. We felt immediately something really serious had happened—from the nerv­ousness of the market. I’ve never seen such panicky order-giving in all my time at the Bourse... Ten times more orders than we could handle, with outrageous quantities and price spreads. You could feel panic in everyone. I got the chills, felt incredibly cold all over—then the sweats. ‘What’s going on?!’I said. Because when it started, we didn’t know what it was. All we knew was that it was total panic. And panic scares people. All the guys who come onto the Bourse now, when we tell them about it they say, ‘I’d sure like to experience that! Damn, that must’ve been something!’. (Boxeman-seller, later head of a broker team and client manager)

I don’t know how to explain it. It’s so wild. If a guy sees it who’s not in it, all he could say is, ‘They should be locked up!’ It’s so violent when it takes off. It’s violent, the power of the market... when it starts moving. When we were in the Gulf War, it was 300 000, 400 000 contracts a day for six months, it was opening and closing.⁷ You’ve gotta be in it... It’s all that counts, you clear out your head, you don’t hear anything anymore. I was in it all that time, that’s why I spieled, because when you’ve got a posi­tion, you’ve got to be in it. Then you’re not surprised when an order comes in, you know the rates, you know who’s doing what, who’s buying, who’s selling... You’ve got to be in it all the time to know where the market is, you’ve got to have a position and know where to strike. (IFT)

The day Buba [Bundesbank] rates went up, I lost 4000 ticks on my first operation.⁸ My first operation! I was long for 300 contracts,⁹ at around 40 on average, and I cut at 10. I lost 400 000 francs. But afterwards I re-initiated, and at the end of the day I’d only lost 700 ticks. Losing 400 000 francs didn’t paralyze me. I went back in and... no, what’s good about me is that when I get slapped down, I’m already raging to get back in. Because, I say to myself, they’re not going to take that away from me—C’mon, back to the front. I take five minutes out from the exchange, smoke a cigarette, clear my head, and charge back in. (Broker, later IFT)

One of the social effects of such heady moments is the production of something resembling collective memory, itself given strong verbal expres­sion. Even though the market actors I spoke with tended to cite the same events (primarily the 1990-1 Gulf War, the 1991 putsch in Russia, the 1992 French referendum on the Maastricht Treaty, and the European Central Bank’s 1993 interest rate decision) and present them similarly, I would hesit­ate to qualify this as full-fledged collective memory because it has not been stabilized within a ‘social framework’, either patrimonial, associative, or around a trade union (Halbwachs 1922 [1924]).

Can what I am calling market action be stabilized within a similar official, legitimate social framework, thereby allowing diffuse, atomized professional memories to be shaped into legitimate collective memory? A partial answer to this question may be found in the City of London. In the street of the London International Financial Futures Exchanges (Liffe) stands a statue of a floor trader, unveiled at a public ceremony by the Mayor of London. Thus encom­passed in a positive public discourse, the statue confers a degree of social value on financial trading and speculation professionals, and hence, indirectly, on their emotions, inscribing them in lasting urban memory. In Paris, on the con­trary, a lack of institutional links, combined with an ideology which keeps market activities in shadow, explains why these memory fragments cannot be aggregated into a collective narrative and thus seem more atomized than truly collective memory. But atomization does not prevent individuals from making retrospective social use of remembered emotions.

The second social and ideological meaning of this type of emotion has to do with the extremely ambivalent attitude these actor-speakers have toward violence. This is suggested by the ‘heady/destructive’ opposition. Once market shock and the strong, unpleasant emotion accompanying it have been felt (‘it was a massacre’; ‘it’s violent, the power of the market’) or once a blow has been taken, the trader, either broker or independent, can only return to the violence of the market (‘I charge back in’; ‘know where to strike’). Such objective movements of violence and counterviolence can only strengthen the ambient male norm and transform it into a social value. ‘I’d sure like to experi­ence that!’ say the newcomers, who have to become integrated and who understand that the violence of the market also serves an initiation function. The ‘heady/destructive’ pair can also reflect a will to power, as when traders feel or imagine that their moves can make the market itself move or change significantly. It did occasionally happen that a sufficient number of inde­pendent traders joined together to ‘push’ the market up or down after a moment of relative price calm, flooding it with orders either to buy or sell. At such times, they were openly pleased to have successfully, if only momentar­ily, gotten on top of the ‘movement’ they had to confront and cope with in both real and symbolic terms every day.

Such counterviolence or will to power can also be observed when trading is experienced as a kind of show-down with The Market, in which case it is generally designated by means of the third-person singular pronoun il or more impersonally as ga (it or that). Here the necessarily human relations that trading involves are effaced and an imaginary, transcendental entity such as that presented in economic theory is constructed. But in actors’ lan­guage, the market can also take on patently human (or animal) characteris­tics: ‘The market is jumpy’; ‘It was healthier’; ‘It’s barfing’.

General formulas of this type may also be used to refer to institutional actors that, while not physically present, ‘shape’ and ‘direct’ market orientations through the buy and sell orders they transmit to the boxemen. This situation may also give rise to indirect references to the Matif SA market and produce utterances in which traders’ ambiguous, often resentment-charged relation with the managing organization are symbolically staged, a relation which sometimes resembles that between boss (Matif) and employees (market actors): ‘Matif... was set up to serve the interests of the big French brokers... and it uses

them... When they can dip into the funds, they do so___ When they can get the

rules to go in their favor, they apply them—that’s how I see it’ (IFT).

Lastly, some traders manage to reappropriate market violence, to make hedonistic use of sensations accompanying the emotions caused by it. This also means that there are diverse sources and springs of professional identity. Hedonistic use of violence may be likened to the uses made of the prestige linked to performance-related emotions (see above). It too arises when profes­sional narcissism and the taste for competition are heightened and quickened.

But caution is in order here. Just as sociologists speak of a ‘rationalization effect’ in the interview context, so with market actors there may sometimes be a ‘hedonization effect’. The ‘heady/destructive’ moments of their experience should be relativized, situated in the long term of their professional trajecto­ries, which obviously do not consist in pure thrill, but a combination of thrill and routine. Nonetheless, actors’ experience of these emotions, like their accounts of and reminiscing about them, are an integral part of the appraisal, in symbolic terms, that each of them makes of his social identity and/or the matter of presenting self outside the market sphere.

A Game, Gaming, Gambling

The term spiel immediately establishes a connection between certain phases of market action and emotions associated with game-playing and gambling:

I’ve always spieled.. .on the house account. The biggest thrill ever was when I did 40 000 contracts by myself. You’ve gotta hold ’em, it’s like sports, you’ve gotta be there physically, and that was my thing...[I discovered spieling] little by little, with the strike force I had¹⁰... Because when you do orders there’re always a few contracts left over, it never comes out just right, and those extra contracts, you’ve either got to cut ’em ¹¹ or handle ’em. And little by little, well, the lure of profit, money, grows, and it made me spiel a little to try to get back my losses, and that really pulled me into spieling ...You realize that our profession is a game in a way. In some way, it’s like a casino...[Today,] the big­ger the volume... the more it moves in all directions, the happier I am. I really get off. It’s like when I was a broker, the more they hit me over the head with orders, the happier I was. Like a game...It’s a sport, too, because it’s physical. A job, yeah, it’s a job because a job makes you a living. But I’d say, you know, it’s more a game. For a guy like me who’s a gambler, it’s a feast...It’s kind of like roulette at the casino, when you put your chip on a number and the wheel spins and it hits your number—you get an adrenalin rush. I don’t get the rush when I initiate, but right afterwards. It’s when I’m in ‘pose’ [position] and it moves with me—or in the opposite direction. Win or lose. But the adrenalin rush comes then, when I’m already in pose and it takes off, for me or against me. If it’s against you, you need the adrenalin for handling the ‘pose’, you’ve gotta have a clear head to get back in and try to bring it back to your prices. And when it rises, it’s to try to bring it along with you, bring it into port. Then you say, hey, it’s mine. It’s then, in fact. It’s not when you get in or when you get out, it’s in between. (IFT on the Notionnel)

Using Roger Cailloix’ categories for classifying games (1958), we can say that the emotions described here bring together the principles and instincts of the agon characteristic of competitive sport (‘it’s like sports, you’ve gotta be there physically’); alea or chance, as in gambling (‘It’s kind of like roulette at the casino’); ilinx or the giddiness and intoxication associated with the desired adrenalin rush but also with emotional ambivalence (‘win or lose’); and even mimicry, if we think of the role-playing suggested by the hesitation about personal identity reflected in the set of disparate terms traders use to designate their occupation: ‘job’, ‘profession’, ‘a game’.

The social effect of this type of emotion is less clear and more ambivalent than for the other two, in that one characteristic of a ‘gambler’ is to be egocentric and to fantasize being disconnected from the surrounding social world. Obviously in the emotions described here, any sense of being discon­nected is quite fleeting. However, the speaker’s precision about the adrenalin- rush experience suggests that despite the oversocialization of the place, market action can generate a kind of violent—and very private—hedonism. The emphasis on sensations, indeed microsensations, shows how important bodily engagement and the heightening of the senses is in full professional engagement in the market.

It should be noted with regard to the gaming aspect, that trader hedonism is particularly ambiguous and ambivalent: it may underline the exceptional nature of what is experienced and strengthen professional identity, but it is also at the core of ever-potential occupational destabilization.

The aspects of market-actor experience constituted by performance and competition, violence, and gaming can thus generate emotions with various, often convergent social effects and meanings. Most importantly, they all show that market action can have ‘other values’ or ‘rewards’ than directly economic ones, as Roy (1953) showed for the context of industrial piece­work, describing the private strategies workers develop for meeting goals or production quotas, wherein they experience ‘the pleasure of a game’. How closely can industrial piecework constraints be compared with the constraint on traders to ‘produce’ futures rates? Both worlds are subject to a pace set outside themselves. All traders, salaried and independent, are affected by market volatility, and the pace and volume of buying and selling orders produces strong constraints that, like industrial piecework, give rise to self­compensation strategies. These strategies are brought to light by the various types of emotion.

For those who are not eliminated from the trading-floor world by the pace and strong emotions, the ‘heady’, ‘intense’, ‘real’ moments, including the most aggressive and violent of them, can also be understood as a way of moment­arily turning the market’s function to other uses. It is significant that when traders cease their activities, one of the things they say they miss most are the moments of intense emotion. Indeed, acceding to such moments is often pre­sented as a kind of privilege, which suggests attribution of social value. For the least educated, this ‘singularity’ fuels their sense of the unpredictability of their social itinerary; they swing back and forth between a feeling of their own audacity and a sense of illegitimacy, a pattern often found among outsiders. For those with the most education, the relative social transgression that such ‘freedoms’ represent also distinguishes them in their own eyes from persons of the same generation who, after the same scholastic career, chose more normed, predictable professions or occupations.

Rather than indicating a way of using the passions that diverts or trans­forms them into interests, traders’ behavior and experience suggests that they manage interests through hedonistic use of the passions.

Vocabulary and Symbolic Representations of Market Emotions

For Marcel Mauss (1968 [1906]), the phenomena of acting in common and thinking in common in shared time and space (particularly in religious rituals) can only be explained by the existence of thought categories which, while not made explicit, nonetheless guide consciousness and are constantly present in language.

For my part, I have tried to deduce from the subjective meaning that traders attribute to their emotions some of the objective effects of those emotions in the social space of the trading floor. To further the initial investigation into relations between passions and interests, I will now try to identify categories of indigenous emotion (or passion) along the lines of Hubert and Mauss’s categories of indigenous thought. My hypothesis here is that on trading floors, which can also be defined as a shared space and time, emotions can likewise be seen (above and beyond their social effects) as the most spontaneous type of individual symbolizing activity. To grasp the sym­bolic framework of market passions, I shall first identify the most frequently occurring signifiers used to express market emotions (Table 5.1).

Like the contexts emotions emerge in (performance, violence, gaming, and gambling), the boundaries of these lexical fields are not impermeable. Metaphor use here, which both establishes a protective distance and works to appropriate market action as a social activity, is not always limited to high- emotion situations, and may be found at less than exceptional moments, where the metaphors used have even stronger sexual connotations: ‘feel up’ or ‘stroke’ the market, ‘touch [= get] a contract’, be ‘in the air’,¹² ‘screw an order’, ‘get the pussy’,¹³ ‘give the market a screw’. Also to describe more routine market life, there is a series of metaphors related to eating—attack ‘la fourchette’,¹⁴ ‘the market is barfing’, etc.—together with regular references to liquidity, which according to some symbolic grids goes with sexuality or bodily intimacy. Jean-Frangois Barre (1991) has noted the recurrence of such terms in international finance writing and suggested possible symbolic meanings.

Though the financial transactions market actors conduct are real and inscribed in specific economic and social relations, could actors be said to momentarily disconnect them from reality when they change the (signified) of a difficult or perilous trade by using a signifier linked to a sports contest, a drive for power, or sexual acts?¹⁵ The question is also raised by a comment that came up in various forms in the interviews: ‘You can’t think about what each trade represents financially...if you did, you couldn’t last’. This suggests that the ‘distancing’ should be thought of as a kind of individual self-regulation, one that can only benefit the market and the market manag­ing institution (Matif SA).

Passion and emotion bring about symbolic productions necessary for coping with the violence of the most extreme phases of market action

Table 5.1. The Panoply of Emotions Performance, competition, extremes Violence, combat, fear, power Gaming, pleasure, sexual activities Everyone’s watching you Strike force A game Can’t believe So violent Gambler The kings of the All the explosions A feast universe Ten times more than Roulette At the widest extremes what we could handle Casino All the extremes The chills Adrenalin rush Outrageous spreads The sweats Great pleasure I didn’t even know Know where to strike Happy my name Panic The greater the volume, Extravagant orders Fear the happier I am Incredibly cold The more it moves, the Holding it all in your happier I am hands Get off Do the market Real moments Hit over the head with Adrenalin rush: when it orders goes my way or Sweat all over the against me place It’s not when you get Intense in or when you get Destructive out, it’s in between Always in the air To like that state Explode Be moving Have a hard-on Torrid Turn-on

(temporal compression and thus intensity of actions and risk, and unpredictable volatility). But the need to symbolize is operative in everyday language also. Passions and emotions are fully present at this level, too, and interest logic does business with the symbolic logic of emotions.

Expressing Emotion is Licit

As will surely have been noticed, market actors do not use euphemisms when expressing their emotions. They speak directly, boldly, do not mince words or water down expressions, have little regard for the proprieties. Restrictive social norms do not apply here and expression of the passions is an integral part of the interpersonal and linguistic environment.

On Matif trading floors in Paris and still today on the floors of Wall Street, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and the Chicago Board of Trade, there are no real sanctions or reprimands for externalizing feelings or showing aggres­siveness (Marks 1988; Abolafia 1996). When emotions lead to serious insults or, on very rare occasions, physical aggression, these infractions are sanctioned by fines or temporary suspensions, but in general, it is socially permissible to express feelings. Here, sport (often evoked by actors to describe market social relations) seems the only relevant area of comparison.

Given the regulative frames for these activities, it would be too much to say that emotional expression is pacified, as Norbert Elias (1994 [1939]) wrote of sports arenas, conceived as pockets of tolerance and regulation within the ‘civilizing process’. Financial markets too would seem to be temporal and spatial enclaves in which aggressiveness may be more freely expressed, spaces where ‘discharge of affects’ and ‘the aggressive expression of pleasure’ (pp. 165-6) are not only allowed to develop and prosper but are socially val­ued. It seems fair to think that an indirect effect of this is to personalize mar­ket relations a bit further, even though such relations are reputed to be neutral. In banks, for example, social relations are framed by reserve and dis­cretion; expression of emotion is censured, repressed, kept in check because considered harmful to the proper functioning of this socioprofessional world. Why, then, is expression of emotion more readily tolerated on trading floors?

One part of the answer is that marking ‘interpersonal distance’ on the trad­ing floor may prove counterproductive (Hassoun 2000a, 2002). Familiarity (limited use of polite expressions, generalized use of the familiar form, loud talking, etc.) is the norm; otherwise the pace of market relations would slow and each trader would have fewer trading partners. I used the term interpersonal liquidity to designate this relation between daily trading volume and the interpersonal norms and know-how that increase the likelihood of participants finding trading partners easily and quickly. Interpersonal liquidity, then, is akin to the liquidity of financial theory, an indigenous category evoked by traders not just regularly but almost obsessively. In financial theory, liquidity is exclusively quantitative, measured by volume of daily exchanges ensuring that investors will be able to buy or sell a contract rather than getting stuck on the market without a trading partner. Human relations in the pit have to be liquid too; that is, smooth enough for transactions to take place with the least possible disturbance or dysfunction.

Social relations on the Matif floor not only had to be familiar and smooth- running, but also had to be unstable; that is, capable of being made and unmade in an instant so that others could be made, and thereby capable of following price instability. The second normative injunction, then, the comple­ment to interpersonal liquidity, can be conceptualized as relational volatility. This notion is a means of qualitatively assessing the tolerance of instability and dispersion so beneficial to market relations in that it enables everyone to multiply market opportunities as fast as possible. Relational volatility can be linked to the financial notion of volatility used to assess and measure price instability and spread. Along with the adjective liquid, the vol, as it is called, is part of the daily linguistic environment, and is used even by actors who have only the vaguest theoretical understanding of it.

Interpersonal liquidity and relational volatility are two sides of the same sociological coin. This somewhat paradoxical pair of normative injunctions— which says, in essence, be on good terms with the greatest possible number of people without being too closely tied to any of them—may be considered a sociological parallel to the liquidity and volatility of financial theory. It is as though the imperative to produce a high quantity of rates and trades in a short time had produced its own social norms.

It is within this framework that the relatively free and licit expression of emotion becomes understandable. In the continual search for relational and organizational efficiency, restricting expression of market-related affect could clog up the works, as is shown by how hard it was for the Matif SA through­out its history (1986-2000), and other organizers of open-outcry markets throughout the world, to impose strict dress codes or behavioral norms on members.

This is a case of necessity determining the law (or norm), an idea which might in turn explain why in economic practices as in sports there is a ‘con­trolled decontrolling of affect’ (Elias and Dunning 1986). The market, seen here as a social institution, could be said to tolerate and ‘accompany’ the expression of market emotions in implicitly functionalist fashion. Because pro­fessionals are able to let loose, they can handle the intense pace, liquidity vol­umes, and high financial and social risk that are integral parts of their work.

In this context, the passions and their expression are not transformed, nor do they evaporate. Instead they are liberated, and integrated into the social norms constructed and imposed by these markets. Like social relations, emotions need to be relatively liquid and volatile, and expression of emotion relatively free and unrestrained.

Incomplete Sublimation?

Given the symbolic aspects and social and institutional uses of market emo­tion, the Freudian notion of sublimation seems relevant. It should be applied with great care, however. Freud specifies that in addition to modifying the object and aim, sublimation is linked to social evaluation or effect. Economic activities—in this case the series of market acts—are obviously not directly connected to sexuality. But when they are a source of intense emotion, and even when they are carried out more calmly and routinely, they are often spo­ken of and symbolized in sexual terms, as shown. This justifies thinking that at least one of their sources is related to sexual energy. The object has obviously been modified, but the sublimation process seems incomplete because the vocabulary used is explicitly sexual, while also having a variety of other connotations such as physical confrontation and sports competition, these too possibly related to libidinal energy. As for what Freud called ‘social evaluation’, it is to be found in the uses that can be made of emotions that have been con­verted into symbolic benefits (recognition and other narcissistic satisfactions, status and territorial appropriation, influence and domination, etc.).

The meaning and value of market emotions can also be grasped in the terms of classic economic reasoning. The emotions that traders seek out and experience could, it seems to me, be considered external to the primary goals of the market in two ways: (1) market movements give the trader or specula­tor the sought benefit of extreme emotions over and above (or next to or below) his potential financial gains, and (2) the individual’s quest for emotion may simultaneously provide financial-market managing institutions with increased dynamism in terms of liquidity and volatility.

It is necessary to keep in mind that on these markets, an increase in activity is always beneficial to market managers because it generates business for them. The Matif SA actually encouraged fits of activity by handing out bonuses (in the form of discounts on every trade realized) and awards for best trader of the month. The winner’s name was ritually announced over the microphone to the whole floor and the award was accompanied with luxury gifts (champagne, expensive ties or scarves). This attitude on the part of the market organizers corresponds to the behavior of some independent traders who, with no precise strategy, bought and sold as many contracts as possible, betting on the prof­itability of such frenetic behavior but also looking for strong emotions. ‘Do the helicopter’, ‘turn over’, or ‘grind out’ contracts are three expressions market members used to qualify behavior they viewed as ‘extreme’ or ‘crazy’.

Conclusion

In seeking an answer to the initial question, we should perhaps focus not on the transformation of passions into interests, which from Montesquieu, con­cerned with society at large, to Adam Smith directly concerned with the mar­ket, was presented as a virtue, but rather on emotions conceived in terms of their differentiated yet intertwined social and institutional uses. These may be situated on three levels or identified as three ‘registers’ of market action, ranging from macro to micro:

1.   The overall functioning of the market, which burns or runs on the energy and apparent disorder of affect, stimulating, making licit, and integrating emotions and various expressions of them within the local normative framework that serves its informal regulation system (market as social institution).

2.    The social construction of the professional market position, which requires a great number of distinctive experiences and prestige accumu­lation, especially since it is itself not firmly institutionalized. This includes phenomena of committing to memory and valuing (profes­sional self-affirmation on a social stage).

3.    The symbolic and linguistic productions necessary for taking on and appropriating the financial, social, and symbolic risks particular to the speculative act (the market individual).

Total Market Action

Each of these levels or registers of action—institutional regulation and stimulation, prestige accumulation, symbolization—are closely linked at one moment or another to emotions. Some of their meanings or effects may be thought of as false notes, gaps, or contradictions with regard to the canonical conception of competitive markets. Indeed, such behavior (along with the personal dispositions it is rooted in) may contradict some of the basic theoretical principles of such markets. For example, the fact that the market managing institution (in this case the Matif SA) stands to profit financially from emotional excitement, and indeed at certain moments stimulates and rewards such emotion, may produce high risk- taking behavior, a phenomena that contradicts the theoretical claim that normal agents are risk-adverse. Similarly, the fact that the professional construction of market actors involves prestige-seeking, at least partially con­tradicts the theoretical atomized character of markets according to which agents are detached during market action from all reference to or dependence on a social group or symbolic reference. In other words, if competition—i.e. succeeding against others within a regulated framework— is a licit principle in economic theory, prestige-seeking would seem off topic for such theory. Lastly, the idea of taking on the market or making it move (if only for a moment) also clearly contradicts the market atomicity principle according to which no actor is strong enough to have an impact on prices and volumes. At times, one actor or group of actors is indeed strong enough.

But is pointing out hiatuses between economic theory and social practice heuristically effective? It would seem preferable to think of the market act microhistorically, in its specific time frame; that is, as a (market) action that can be broken down into qualitatively distinct but ultimately interdependent sequences (see the interview excerpt on the adrenalin rush). Once the paradigm of historicity and/or microhistoricity has been introduced, we see that the three comprehensive explanatory levels or registers—which may be considered a three-part paradigm—suggest a melting of emotion into economic action, action whose complexity cannot be grasped unless we take into account the emotional tension consubtantial with it.

These three levels or registers must be understood as linked if they are to explain both the repeated production of emotions and the social licitness of expressing them in the ways they are expressed. Taken together, they tran­scend common oppositions between economic and social facts, between rational action in the pursuit of self-interest and impassioned irrational action, generating instead an approach in terms of ‘total market action’ (along the lines of Mauss’s ‘total social fact’). Even if market actors, like those in many other parts of the social world, generally distrust emotion and say they try to hold it in check, citing either the necessary, almost mythic cool of calculation, the need for discipline, or the importance of ethics, such emo­tions are an integral part of trading-floor activity. They are not marginal, nor do they constitute aporia. Normative judgments of the type just cited can only make it difficult to take into account the market action as a complex whole. This is what market actors seemed to be saying in their own fashion when they laid claim to their role in ‘making’ the market and its history, including in that claim—while neither dissolving or mythicizing them—the taste and in some cases the quest for prowess, risk, and money. That triptych of values works to forge a kind of ethos from which emotions are not absent and in which they may even be practical and necessary.

Notes

1.   Though the trading floors of Paris and London no longer exist, open-outcry mar­kets are of course still in operation in New York and Chicago. I have chosen to keep the greater part of this account and analysis in the present tense.

2.   From 1986 to 2000, French futures markets were officially managed by the Matif SA, identified as a specialized financial institution (IFS). Its main shareholders were France’s major banks and insurance companies. The Matif was a hybrid insti­tution with somewhat difficult-to-reconcile functions; it was both a for-profit ser­vice provider materially running the market and charging brokerage firms a small fee for each deal, and the institution charged with overseeing activity and ensuring rule compliance. At the time, this configuration could be qualified as a French par­ticularity, since British and American exchanges were and continue to be member- owned (the Liffe in London, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) or Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME)). Matif SA has since been absorbed by Euronext, itself a publicly traded company.

3.   Initiating means starting a buying and selling cycle that invariably ends in exit from the market.

4.   Futures contracts traded on the Notionnel were composed of a basket of French government bonds. Volumes were greatest here. With some awe, traders called it a market of ‘big ones’.

5.   CAC 40 Futures: market for futures contracts based on the CAC 40 (basket of forty weighted French firms representative of the national economy). The Matif also managed the Paris Interbank Offered Rate (Pibor), the interest rate futures market.

6.   30,000 francs = €4,573.17.

7.   As agitated as for market openings and closings.

8.   The tick (also oreille, ‘ear’, in French jargon) is the basic price change unit. It was 1 franc (approximately €0.15).

9.   Long: selling.

10.  Strike force: number of futures contracts a salaried broker was permitted to trade.

11.  Cut a contract: sell regardless of price bought at.

12.  ‘S’envoyer en l’air’ is the equivalent of ‘screw’ or ‘have it off’.

13.  ‘Avoir la chatte’ (= pussy)= ‘avoir de la chance’, be lucky.

14.  Fourchette: the difference between asking and bidding prices. The word also means fork.

15.  ‘Fuck the market’, ‘get fucked by the market’ are current expressions.