Sophie and the salesman

Let us start with a powerful image developed by Daniel Miller (2002) in an earlier critique of Callon’s perspective, that of Sophie and the car salesman. Sophie is buying a car, and Miller asks if Sophie’s process of choosing a car, and the salesman’s actions in selling to her, can be regarded in terms of ‘disentanglement’.

At the same time, the other market actor - the salesman - equally pushes towards totalization rather than disentanglement. For a start, his economic behaviour is embedded in his own complex world of family, colleagues and corporation. But, more than this, he aims at an increasing entanglement of the car in the meanings that make up Sophie’s world. Both he and the huge corporate sales drive that stands behind him aim to produce a ‘car’ (in the widest cultural sense of the term) that is already so entangled in her aesthetic, functional, relational, rational world that it is in some sense already Sophie’s car. The most telling line is: ‘The problem is whether business could ever be entangled enough to reflect the totalizing acts of the purchase.’

The disagreement between Gallon and Miller is not over whether there is a diversity of forms of markets and of calculation. Callon is very clear that, although ‘homo economicus really does exist’ (Callon 1998: 51), this figure takes many forms and the task is to find the different devices that produce them.

At one level, which has been particularly well explored within anthropology, Miller is correct: attempts to characterize either modern markets or a modern economic order (capitalism) in terms of a purified mode of calculation have largely failed. Supposedly non-market forms of exchange such as gifting involve highly complex modes of calculation, including abstracting quantifications such as the timing of events and the interpretation of relative magnitudes (Bourdieu 1989). Gommodity exchange is always intermixed or hybrid. Second, we cannot distinguish socio-historical formations by the complete dominance of particular modes of exchange. It is untenable to argue that in contemporary life, as opposed to something called traditional society, all forms of exchange other than a pure market type have been either eradicated or subordinated.

Let us accept for the moment that, first, Miller’s hypothetical example is a plausible one, which Gallon needs to accommodate; and, second, that it suggests that Gallon is employing an overly restrictive notion of calculation. Is there a way of reformulating Gallon’s position that retains its analysis of markets as formatting economic behaviour but without identifying markets with a particular form of calculation? Indeed, there is an earlier step in Gallon’s argument that identifies contemporary exchange and distinguishes it from gift exchange - as many anthro­pologists would - in terms of a kind of transaction rather than any one kind of calculation. Gallon begins with the anthropologist Nicholas Thomas (1991), who originally provided the terminology of entanglement and disentanglement. In this formulation, what distinguishes market transactions from non-market transactions is alienation, rather than calculation. Market exchange is commodity exchange. It presumes a form of property right in which a transfer of ownership ends all claims of the previous owner: the object is thoroughly alienated. When we finish the transaction, we are quits. As opposed to gifting, commodity exchange does not aim to perpetuate a social bond between buyer and seller but, indeed, to get it over with as quickly and cheaply as possible. It certainly aims to repeat the procedure in large aggregate numbers (repeat sales, customers who come back for more and are described as ‘loyal’) but not in order to sustain some broader social connection beyond the immediate market transaction.

Let us go back to Sophie and the salesman. Miller’s description is completely plausible. Her market calculations can include as relevant a vast range of consider­ations and entanglements that are officially excluded both by economic theory and indeed by the devices described by Gallon (policy, law, architecture, metrologies).

If we take this step backwards from ‘calculativeness’ to alienated transactions, we might want to understand the market situation in terms of Weberian rationalization rather the existence or not of homo economicus. The individualization of objects, actors and exchanges establishes a stable and reliable context in which objects and obligations are clearly mapped out and can be intersubjectively recognized. The stability of legal entities and frameworks allows for reliable and predictable encounters, and in this much broader sense allows ‘calculation’: if I go to court over a contract, I want to believe that the upshot will be non-arbitrary and impersonal, hence calculable in the sense that I can assess my chances of success. The issue, then, is broader than the question of formal price rationality. This kind of transaction clearly requires the kind of separative technology that Gallon describes: it presumes individuated objects that can be materially and conceptually disentangled from their context as discrete and transactable things, items that can be passed from one context to another as property.

object loses its meaning or cultural connection in the process of exchange, only that this particular piece of matter can indeed be transferred to someone else’s ownership.

Callon’s externality argument is about one aspect and consequence of this individuating technology. The concepts of framing and externality identify the limits of a transaction by identifying consequences and liabilities. What respon­sibilities or consequences should be registered within individual exchanges? Where should the obligations incurred in that exchange end? This involves identifying and measuring agents and processes, and therefore involves forms of knowledge, among which Callon is particularly concerned with technical expertise (but there are many others that we need to consider). This entire issue arises solely because private property detaches parties to an individual exchange from any sense of obligation beyond the immediate transaction. It is through the cut-off represented by externality, the limits that are imposed on obligation, that what we recognize as the economic is accomplished. What Callon has really helped us see is that these limits, this cut-off, is a matter of considerable negotiation, and that to understand the boundaries of markets and market behaviours we need to attend to the fuzziness, instability, negotiability of these limits. Market exchange might be characterized by the fact that at the end of a transaction ‘we are quits’, but the externalities argument indicates how difficult it can be to agree on when we are quits.