With the descriptive model of markets as sign processes, allusion
was made to the open character of any transaction. With the
discussion regarding the many phases through which markets are
constituted, allusion was made to the distributed nature of
market processes. In order to further explain the changed
condition of human self- constitution in the market of a
radically new scale and dynamics, we need to add some details to
both characteristics mentioned.
Like any other sign process, language processes are human
processes. The person speaking or writing a text continues to
constitute his identity in one or the other, while
simultaneously anticipating the constitutive act of listening to
or interpreting the potential or intended readership. Visual,
auditory, tactile, olfactory, verbal, or written expression, as
well as combinations of these, which composes the language of
performance, dance, architecture, etc., are in the same
condition. A viewer or viewers can associate an image with a
text, music, odors, textures, or with combinations of these.
Furthermore, the association can continue and can be conveyed to
others who will extend it ad infinitum, sometimes so far that
the initial sign (which is the initial person interpreting that
sign in anticipation of the interpretation given by others),
i.e., the image, text, or music that triggered the process, is
forgotten.
Expanding this concept to the products of human activity, we can
certainly look at various artifacts from the perspective of what
they express-a need specifically fulfilled by a machine, a
product, a type of food or clothing, an industry; what they
communicate-the need shared by few or many, the way this need is
addressed, what it says about those constituted in the product
and those who will confirm their identity by using it, what it
says about opportunity and risk taking; andwhat they signify-in
terms of the level of knowledge and competence achieved.
This is not to say that the milk we buy from a farmer or in the
supermarket, the shoes, cars, homes, vacation packages, and
shares in a company or options in a stock are all signs or
language. Rather, they can be interpreted as signs standing for
an object (the state of manufacturing, quality of design,
competence, or a combination of these) to be interpreted in view
of the framework for the pragmatics of human self- constitution
that the pragmatics makes possible. There are many instances when
a word simply dies on the lips of the speaker because nobody
listens or nobody cares to continue interpreting it. There are
as many instances when a product dies because it is irrelevant
to the pragmatic framework of our lives. There are other
instances when signs lose the quality of interpretability.
A company that goes public is identified through many qualifiers.
Its potential growth is one of them-this is why
Internet-oriented companies were so highly valued in their
initial public offerings. Potential can be conveyed through
literate descriptions, data regarding patents, market analysis,
or an intuitive element that there is more to this new market
sign than only its name and initial offering price. At a small
scale of human experience, the neighbors wanted to own some of
the action; at a larger scale, literacy conveyed the information
and acted as a co-guarantor. At today's scale, many similar
businesses are already in place, others are emerging; supply and
demand meet in the marketplace where one's risk can be someone
else's gain. Literacy is no longer capable of providing the
background for the dynamics of change and renewal. If literacy
could still control market transactions, Netscape-synonymous with
the Internet browser-would have never made it; nor the companies
that develop software facilitating telephone calls via the
Internet.
In the markets of relative homogeneity, language proved to be an
appropriate means of coordination. For as long as the various
contexts making up today's global market were not as radically
different as they are becoming, literacy represented a good
compromise. But when market transactions themselves shift from
exchanging goods against goods, or the exchange of goods for
some universal substitute (gold, silver, precious stones with
qualities of permanency), or even for a more conventional unit
(money), for more abstract entities, such as the Ecu (the basket
of currencies of the European Community), the Eurodollar, or the
e-money transacted over networks, literacy is replaced by the
literacies of the segmented practical instances of each
transaction. Shares of an Italian or Spanish company, futures on
the American commodities market, bonds for Third World
investment funds-they all come with their own rules of
transaction, and with their own languages.
The specialization that increases market efficiency results in a
growing number of literacies. These literacies bring to the
market the productive potential of companies and their
management value. They encode levels of expected productivity in
farming (and a certain wager on weather conditions),
entrepreneurial risks assumed within the context of progressive
globalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded in
programs designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition,
the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market in
the global economy insert other literacies, in this case, the
literacy of machines endowed with search and heuristic
capabilities independent of literacy.
Market simulations trigger intelligent trade programs and a
variety of intelligent agents, capable of modifying their
behavior, and achieve higher and higher transaction performance.
In short, we have many mediations against the background of a
powerful integrative process: the pragmatic framework of a
highly segmented economy, working in shorter production cycles,
for a global world. In this process, almost nothing remains
sequential, and nothing is centralized. Put in different words,
almost all market activity takes place in parallel processes.
Configurations, i.e., changing centers of interest, come into
existence on the ever fluid map of negotiations. Being a
self-organizing nucleus, each deal has its own dynamics.
Relations among configurational nuclei are also dynamic.
Everything is distributed. The relations between the elements
involved are non-linear and change continuously. Solidarity is
replaced by competition, often fiercely adversarial. Thus the
market consumes itself, and the sequels of literacy, requiring
provisional and distributed literacies.
Each time individuals project their identity in a product, the
multi-dimensional human experience embodied in the product is
made available for exchange with others. In the market, it is
reduced to the dimension appropriate to the given context of the
transaction. Human behavior in the market is symptomatic of the
self-awareness of the species, of its critical and self-critical
capabilities, of its sense of the future. The progressive
increase of the abstract nature of market transactions, the
ominous liberation from literacy, and adoption of technologies
of efficient exchange define a sense of future which can be
quite scary for people raised in a different pragmatic context.
We are beyond the disjunctive models of socialist ideologies of
bourgeois property, class differences, reproduction of labor
power, and similar categories that emerged in the pragmatic
framework that made literacy (and human constitution through
literacy) possible and necessary. Property, as much as markets,
is distributed (sometimes in ways that do not conform with our
sense of fairness). People define their place in the continuum
of a society that in many ways does away with the exceptional
and introduces a model based on averaging and resulting in
mediocrity. The human being's self-constitutive power is not
only reproduced in new instances of practical activity, but also
augmented in the pragmatics of surplus creating higher surplus.
Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of the
exceptional as this applies to their products and the way they
constitute themselves through their work.