This article focuses upon the construction of wants and the embodying of the market in
the work routines of workers on the Swiss foreign exchange market. The authors are
particularly concerned with the role of the computer screen within the establishment of
postsocial relations around a sense of embodied lack. The screen does not provide access
to the market but is the market as an exteriorized assemblage of practices brought
together in one place. The screen is the (ontologically liquid) market rather than its
representation into which traders immerse themselves. Traders engage with this market in
their daily work practices through a constructed sense of lack that requires them to act
passionately within the market in order to satisfy the self understood as a structure of
wanting. While Knorr Cetina and Bruegger draw on a Lacanian understanding of the self as
lack, rather than focus on the formation of direct human social relations around this
issue, they look instead at the materiality of lack and its position within the postsocial
relations constituted through trading online in the foreign exchange market. Desire is
constituted and realized here through the object of the computer screen rather than with
other people directly. In this way relations between persons are mediated by real objects
that constitute persons virtually.
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