roBBie moore
The New York Stock Exchange at 11 Wall Street is more a TV studio than a financial hub. Thirty broadcasters report from the trading floor every day, and the former Trading Post 9 is now a permanent studio set for CNBC. In terms of hard news gathering, the presence of TV cameras is pointless. The action happens elsewhere. Crashes no longer play out as a wave of trading-floor panic among knee-high piles of paper; rather, crashes play out silently in digital code, triggered by quirks in automatic trading software. For this reason, the website MarketWatch announced in 2014 that they’d no longer use photos of traders to illustrate their stock market reports. These photographs are a nostalgic fiction, MarketWatch said, when trading is ‘done almost entirely by computers piping algorithmic playbooks into a fortress of servers in Mahwah [New Jersey]’ (Olshan 2014).
This moment has been a long time coming. The process of automation and mediatisation of stock trading has been underway for 150 years, at least since the arrival of the stock ticker in 1867. The stock ticker was both a network and a machine. As a network, the ticker connected the New York Stock Exchange with hundreds (in the 1870s) and then thousands (by the turn of the century) of brokerage firms, banks, private offices, and upscale institutions like the Waldorf Astoria and Delmonico’s, along with sub-networks of saloons and bucket shops (Preda 2009: 127; Hochfelder 2006: 340). Similar networks were established nationally and internationally, radiating from trading centres like Chicago and London. Ticker networks delivered a more or less continuous and more or less live stream of trading data to its members.
Each receiver in the network had a stock ticker machine that converted the telegraphic signal into marks on paper. The machine also had a decorative and totemic function: often literally placed on a pedestal at the centre of an office or lobby, the early-model ticker was topped with an oracular glass dome, around which crowds gathered to watch the tape unfurl. The ticker machinery comprised two printing wheels, one with letters and one with numerals and fractions, which printed the name, price, and volume of stocks onto spools of ticker tape. Each data point was in itself almost meaningless.
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The reader of the ticker looked for the relations between ticks, seeking not a discrete piece of information but a direction, a pattern. It was a reading practice which yearned towards the future, a reading practice whose ultimate goal was not to understand the message sent, but to anticipate the message yet to be sent. There was clearly an amnesiac quality to the quick movement of the tape, especially as the machine was almost always poised above a waste-paper basket, so that each message was only ever a few ticks away from trash.
The present of the ticker rapidly faded.
By the turn of the twentieth century, the ticker had been absorbed into American culture. Some commentators asserted an affinity between literary and ticker-tape storytelling technologies. ‘[T]here is no more interesting or exciting serial story than the stock ticker tells’, wrote the banker Henry Clews (Zimmerman 2006: 223). The stockbroker and writer Edwin Lefèvre, who advised Frank Norris on the inner workings of the wheat market for The Pit, believed that ticker tape was pure, distilled narrative: ‘A foot was a book; a yard, a history’ (Lefèvre 1907: 2). The ticker tape reader, who interpreted the narrative encoded on the tape, became a recognisable type in the culture of the Progressive Era. ‘It is striking how often the dramas of Wall Street are illustrated (both visually and verbally) not with noisy scenes of crowds and mass hysteria but with small scale scenes of concentrated reading’ (Knight 2013: 49). In an increasingly abstract, financialised economy, the tape reader functioned as a medium: a human embodiment of a disembodied system, able to read and interpret the signs of spectral capital. Tape readers were part human, part mechanical in their sensitivity to market vibrations. The hero of Edwin Lefèvre’s Sampson Rock of Wall Street (1907), for instance, has to evacuate his humanity in order to be at one with the rhythm of the tape, even as he asserts his human mastery over the prosthetic machine: ‘an elbow resting on one corner of the ticker-stand, tense, immobile, something less than human, something more than human about him, his eyes fixed hypnotically on the tape’ (Lefèvre 1907: 54). Ticker-tape readers were a symptom of, but also a potential remedy for, the abstraction of capital: heroic figures who could, it was argued, imagine capital in its totality through deep reading of the tape.
This chapter traces the concept of the tape reader as a superhuman reader of reality, from Frank Norris to two technographic experiments in the 1930s:
Archibald MacLeish’s tickerised verse drama Panic and Bob Brown’s ticker-inspired reading machine, in which literature looks to machinery as a means of renewing the language and revitalising the practice of reading itself.
The rising prominence of the ticker coincided with a crisis in the literary representation of capitalism. Frank Norris’s ‘Epic of the Wheat’ novels, dealing with huge, interlocking economic systems, foreground the limits of their own representational capacities. David A Zimmerman describes the ‘economic sublime’ in Norris’s fiction: ‘the idea that commercial events or operations, because of their speed, complexity, or abstractness, terrify and oppress the individual who witnesses them’ (Zimmerman 2006: 142). In Norris’s The
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Octopus (1901), the corporation – with its diffuse, suprahuman ‘personhood’ – eludes traditional mimetic strategies:
The corporation might be the absent center of this naturalist novel; it cannot be made manifest by anyone, from president to poet. […] The Octopus is finally a novel of displacements in which representations proliferate, split, metastasize, and then disappear entirely because accurate representation itself is untenable under the corporate form. (Mrozowski 2011: 180)
The stock ticker installed at the Derricks’ wheat ranch offers Norris a way of apprehending the corporate octopus: drawing a web of connections that joins the farmers to the San Francisco exchange, ‘and through that city with Minneapolis, Duluth, Chicago, New York, and at last, and most important of all, with Liverpool’ (Norris 1986: 619). The ticker is introduced in the novel’s second chapter; here, Norris sketches the geographic reach of the network:
no doubt, the most significant object in the office was the ticker. […] During a flurry in the Chicago wheat pits in the August of that year, which had affected even the San Francisco market, Harran and Magnus had sat up nearly half of one night watching the strip of white tape jerking unsteadily from the reel. At such moments they no longer felt their individuality.
The ranch became merely the part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land the whole world round, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant – a drought on the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine. (619-20)
Ticker tape used a simplified syntax of company name, price, and volume of stock traded, which the ticker reader interpreted as noun, verb (up or down), and adverb (up or down a lot or a little). Norris mimics the ticker’s syntax in his repeated evocation of ‘a [weather event] on the [ecosystem] of [region]’.
Here, ecosystems are rendered as interchangeable nouns that are acted upon by a positive or negative variable (a weather event). Up or down; drought or rain. That the ecosystems are almost all exotically particularised (prairie, steppe, llanos) actually has the effect of hollowing out their spatial specificity, drawing attention to the signifier itself as an empty geocultural cliché. Norris’s tickerised syntax doesn’t so much map the global wheat market as rhetorically replicate the way territories are incorporated and reified by the market. The effect is all the more striking coming immediately after the novel’s first chapter, in which the travelling writer Presley surveys the Californian landscape from a hilltop and summons the spirits of the epic poets to rhapsodise the immensity of rural life that surrounds him: ‘the imagination itself expanded
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under the stimulus of that measureless range of vision’ (613). In displacing the first chapter’s thick descriptions of place, Norris’s tickerised catalogue signals a new form of epic vision, able to gesture toward capitalism’s immensities even as it admits the impossibility of representation beyond the generic.
To look through Norris’s ticker-eye is to become wraith-like, hovering over howling empty expanses. In Lefèvre’s Sampson Rock of Wall Street – described by one reviewer as ‘Four hundred pages of unrelieved tape and ticker, ticker and tape’ (‘Review of the Season’s Fiction’ 1907: 761) – the ticker-eye grants the hero a more romantic form of epic vision. In a passage dense with mixed metaphors, Lefèvre’s ticker collapses the boundary between representation and reality, labour and capital, body and system:
He approached the ticker and gazed intently on the printed letters and numbers of the tape, so intently that they ceased to be numerals and became living figures. […] The tape-characters were like little soldier-ants, bringing precious loads to this New York office, tiny gold nuggets from a thousand stockholders, men and women and children, rich and poor, to the feet of Sampson Rock. […] the entire State of Virginia was spread before him in miniature, like an outrolled map, glowing and glittering poly-chromatically in a flood of sunshine. And through this map ran a line, not a ticker-tape, with towns instead of abbreviations or bridges instead of dashes, but a vein; and it was not a vein of human blood or of human tears, but of human sweat, a living thing, born of work, stretching tentacle-like arms everywhither[;]
the same net-work of life-giving and life-creating veins extending to the Great River and the Great Lakes. (Lefèvre 1907: 16-17)
The panoramic perspective of the ticker brings ‘Order out of chaos’ (17) and restores wholeness to a fractured society. Through the ticker, Sampson occupies the necessarily imaginary centre of capitalism’s decentred network:
the ‘veins’ of this body politic radiate outward from himself. In constituting a fantasised centre, Sampson imposes a feudal conception of an organised social totality onto capitalist relations of production. He becomes the ruler of a capitalist kingdom, in which ticker-numerals deliver supplicatory tributes to his feet. The lofty vantage of the ticker here acts like the enchanted mirror or crystal ball of a sorcerer-monarch. The fantasy points to the Übermensch complex common to many representations of the ticker-tape reader in this period: as Alex Preda notes, the ‘myth of superhuman powers of the speculator became entrenched in the repertoire of popular culture’ (Preda 2009: 207).
Sampson Rock’s ability to see through the tape to the world itself is founded on the belief that to read price fluctuations is to take the pulse of social reality. This belief took form in the ‘Dow Theory’ expounded by the editor of the Wall Street Journal, William Peter Hamilton, and in the work
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of influential financial journalist and banker Charles A. Conant (Ott 2004:
12-13). The latter argued in 1904 that the stock exchange was a ‘barometer’ for the entire national economy, representing aggregated expert opinion on the true value of assets:
If a railway is built in the wilderness of Manitoba and proves unprofitable, the investor does not need to hunt up people in Manitoba to ask how much freight and how many passengers it is carrying; he has only to look at the quotations for its bonds or stock on the New York Stock Exchange to know at once what is the judgment of experts on its value as a commercial enterprise.
[…] Thus through the publicity of knowledge and prices, the bringing of a multitude of fallible judgments upon this common ground to an average, there is afforded to capital throughout the world an almost unfailing index of the course in which new production should be directed. (Conant 1904: 91-2)
If stock prices are an (almost) unfailing index of present (and future) events, then the flow of prices on a ticker tape is an unedited rendering of that reality in language. This idea was popularised in tape-reading guidebooks: ‘The tape tells the news minutes, hours, and days before the news tickers, or newspapers, and before it can become current gossip. Everything from a foreign war to the passing of a dividend; from a Supreme Court decision to the ravages of the boll weevil is reflected primarily upon the tape’ (Tape 1910: 11). The ticker’s automatic writing, therefore, was a reflection – a transparent representation – of the real. Ticker reading took on a Calvinist attitude toward the holy text as the revealed word of God, through which the natural world may be primarily understood: an electro-Calvinism tempered, in the writings of Lefèvre and others, by the need for a clerical class of hermeneuticians trained in the arts of revelation. As Lefèvre writes in one of his short stories, ‘[t]here was no god but the ticker, and the brokers were its prophets!’ (Lefèvre 1901: 179).
While Norris and Lefèvre think about the ticker-eye in terms of mastery and totality, Will Payne’s wire-tapping novel The Losing Game (1910) shows a more proletarian way of writing about the ticker. The protagonists of the novel, Emma Raymond and John Pound, are telegraph operators in a stock-ticker sweatshop. Their work is to notate the live stock-ticker feed from the New York Stock Exchange, and to retransmit the data to secondary ticker networks of local brokers and dubious ‘bucket shops’ (where customers place bets on the movements of the market). This is physical labour: watched by a rheumatic manager, the rows of operators sweat in the heat as they hunch over their machines, producing a ‘hard, rapid, senseless clatter’ (Payne 1910: 12). Emma and John are strangers who happen to be seated side by side. Their bodies transmit clicking, sparking, telegraphic expressions of desire as they work:
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He merely touched the slips from the top of his pack, making the woman reach an arm’s length to get them — which she did silently and steadily, putting them on top of her pack; her fingers touching the keys of her machine. […] That occasional look through her dark, demure eyelashes seemed to throw off tiny sparks. Twice or thrice, also, her lips parted slightly and, very gently, she clicked her small, white teeth together. (9)
But their seduction stalls and fizzles in the alienated factory environment.
Alienation and sexual frustration are fused together in an image of mechanical breakdown: ‘Nearly everything in the room seemed trying to do something that it couldn’t. The man and woman got to no culminative point in their game; the brass contrivance stirred and sparked, but didn’t go; the light no sooner showed in a bulb than it died’ (10). They are trapped in a cycle of eternal repetition, telegraphing messages into the ether which will never be reciprocated. The solution, however, is not to escape the machine but to take control of it: to close the circuit and become both sender and receiver in the network. Emma meets John conspiratorially after work, and they discuss ways to escape their predicament. Though they are expert readers and interpreters of the ticker, neither has had any luck playing the market. The game is rigged, they believe, whether by bucket shops or more legitimate exchanges. To win, John argues, ‘a fellow must play the game from the inside’ (23). John has previous experience tapping wires, while Emma has experience ‘tapping’
cash registers. They devise a plan to manipulate the ticker. John explains that ticker operators sometimes accidentally neglect to send out a stray stock quote or two and, upon realising their mistake, send out the overlooked quote preceded by the letter ‘s’, which alerts the receiver to the error. John suggests that he can exploit the ‘s’ code to send data out of order, misinforming the ticker sub-network about the true live price of stocks. Emma, watching the ticker tape in a bucket shop, will recognise John’s signals and place winning bets on the special stocks he marks out; only she and John will know that these stocks have already risen in price. In exploiting this weakness in the system, Emma and John assert control over the flow of information and are no longer subject to the ticker’s temporality. This manipulation of the ticker stands in for scenes of seduction. The barrier to their union is John’s ‘bottled up’ heart:
‘At once his heart stirred as though something had pricked it, and he bottled himself up again. By that time she was familiar with the bottling process.
He would move only an inch at a time’ (21). ‘Tapping’ the wires becomes a liquid metaphor for unstopping this bottled up desire. The novel doesn’t supplant Emma and John’s initial telegraphic flirtation with something more authentically human; instead, it imagines love as the smooth transmission and decryption of electric messages.
If The Losing Game was written, as one reviewer argued, ‘for people with a sneaking admiration for the kind of rascality that it pictures so graphically
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and so attractively’ (‘Current Fiction’ 1910: 377), such rascality was being stamped out in the 1910s through the consolidation of the network and the professionalisation of tape reading. This process would further elevate and masculinise the image of the ticker reader. Before the process of consolidation, access to the ticker through bucket shops and other informal establishments was widespread. One New York broker complained in 1889 that ‘indiscriminate distribution of stock quotations to every liquor-saloon and other places has done much to interfere with business. Any person could step in a saloon and see the quotations’ (Hochfelder 2006: 340). While legitimate brokerages were exclusive, the Chicago Tribune suggested in 1879 that bucket shops had a clientele drawn from across races, genders and classes: ‘any person, man or woman […] white, black, yellow, or bronze can deal directly’
(341). In 1892, The Sun reported on one of Chicago’s women-only bucket shops, filled mostly with ‘elderly maidens and widows, with an occasional married woman who dabbles in stocks without the knowledge of any one but her broker’ (‘Interesting Information’ 1892: 18). The article suggests that women ‘feel the pulse of the market much quicker than men’, though they must pay a higher moral price, becoming ‘oblivious to sentiment and careless of personal appearance, and absurdly superstitious’ (18). From the 1880s, the New York Stock Exchange began to pursue legal, political, and economic strategies to limit ticker access and curtail amateur tape readers (Preda 2009:
139-40; Hochfelder 2006: 350-55). Wires were ripped out of walls by the police. The Sun reported in 1894 that Boston police had ordered all stock and news tickers out of saloons, hotels, and restaurants; the police refused to name the statute under which they were acting (‘Ordered Out the Tickers’ 1894: 1).
The Chicago Exchange enforced an information blackout in 1890, trying to starve the bucket shops out of business (Hochfelder 2006: 352). Finally, the New York exchange took on the Western Union telegraph monopoly, which was profiting handsomely from bucket shops. By 1892, Western Union was
The Chicago Exchange enforced an information blackout in 1890, trying to starve the bucket shops out of business (Hochfelder 2006: 352). Finally, the New York exchange took on the Western Union telegraph monopoly, which was profiting handsomely from bucket shops. By 1892, Western Union was