Transacting strangers
However, there is another aspect of alienation which Callon tends to summarize in terms of market exchange as ‘transactions between strangers’. This way of putting things apparently contradicts much that contemporary economic sociology and anthropology has tried to establish: that modern markets are embedded in enduring networks, moral frameworks and chains of transaction.
These factors belie the notion that economies can be understood in terms of individual exchanges between individual strangers. However, although the term ‘strangers’ is not entirely helpful (simply because transactors might know each other very well over time), Callon’s underlying point is crucial: in gifting, the act of exchange is inseparably the reproduction of the social relationship in which it is embedded. In the mundane process of putting food on the table, I am reproducing family relationships, roles and obligations. Sophie and the salesman, on the other hand, insofar as they are engaged in a market transaction, reproduce no social roles other than that of buyer and seller. Sophie will very definitely reproduce far more aspects of her life through the process of consumption, and that will have informed her process of shopping - precisely as Miller depicts it - but not in the exchange itself. It is in this sense that Sophie and the salesman are strangers.This has huge consequences for the way in which Sophie’s and the salesman’s entanglements relate to the transaction. It may well be the case that the salesman needs to understand Sophie’s world in great detail, and even that he is a better salesman to the extent that his understanding is more profound. This may even result in significant gains to Sophie (for example, a better choice of car) as well as to company profits and his own commissions. But there is no sense in which the salesman - in order to complete the transaction - must share Sophie’s world, or agree with it, respect it, treat it as an end in itself.
It is merely a condition of sale; Marx would have said that it was the presence of use-value that is necessary in order to realize exchange value. The relationship between Sophie and the salesman is an instrumental one, and it is technical rationality - rather than quantification - that needs to be at the centre of defining ‘calculativeness’ in markets. The structure of the transaction involves an instrumentality which can take very wide and blurred forms and which allows for the market to be the site of quite mixed calculations.This objectification of the lifeworld of the other is quite compatible with core claims of economic sociology. As market transactors, Sophie and the salesman are involved in reproducing their buyer and seller roles, and these require a moral framework, a non-contractual basis for contract (e.g. a sense of just price or of ethical obligations). Therefore, Sophie and the salesman do share an ethical order, but they need share only one that applies to the transaction; the transaction as such does not require any wider moral bond, or one that links the market transaction to other ways in which they might be socially connected to each other. Except that, as Gallon argues, the limits of each transaction (and therefore the limits of their shared ethical framework) involves ethical, political and cognitive contestation. These limits are not only fuzzy, but establishing them involves reaching ever outwards from the market to wider social technologies and institutions. This is precisely where framing and externality come in: decisions have to be taken and institutionalized as to what is formally to be included within the notion of a market transaction. For example, consumer laws that enforce after-sales service, or return of goods, or corporate liability are precisely points at which the ethical framework which Sophie and the salesman share specifically as market actors is negotiated in ethico-legal terms. The entire point of this kind of framing is that it is completely compatible with (and necessary to) an essentially instrumental relationship between strangers rather than the reproduction of other social identities.
They are the object of technologies which isolate them and their world as strangers within a strategic relationship. Moreover, this is quite compatible with seeing market exchange as having blurred boundaries with networks and more enduring trade relationships over time: in such cases, a key issue is precisely the relationship between individual transactions and longer-term commitment, and how this is to be consensually framed and formalized.Miller would like to dissolve the market into broader social entanglements on the grounds that the purified modes of calculability that Gallon describes simply do not exist. I am arguing rather that there really is such a thing as a market (however multi-form) because there is such a thing as commodity exchange which is characterized by specific forms of property right. This form of contract means that exchange is disembedded in seriously consequential ways. It does not mean that objects and people become formal and abstract as in homo economicus, but it does mean that their substantive nature, their ‘entangledness’, becomes the object of instrumental calculation. Sophie and her salesman are certainly entangled in complex social worlds; they just are not the same worlds, and each wants to get the most out of the other’s.