Becoming economic: a political phenomenology of car purchases

"The point of this dissertation is to revisit the most ambiguous and perhaps most controversial aspect of Karl Polanyi's embeddedness thesis, namely the implication that socially disembedded economic action (i.e. action guided by a purely calculative disposition, ontologically separate from considerations of sociality) is ""always embedded"" (Block, 2003: 294) nonetheless. I aim, that is, to trouble and interrogate what it means to say that economic action is either embedded or disembedded. Yet what follows is less a re-evaluation of these ideas than a 'reboot,' given that Polanyi is rarely mentioned herein- less still Mark Granovetter, embeddedness' more recent champion. I call instead upon an altogether different set of protagonists: Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who in 2002 and -5 squared off in a fruitful debate on the nature of economy. The analysis here adopts their terminology - entanglement versus disentanglement - as well as Miller's ethnographic sensibility, specifically of car purchases.

Via semi-structured interviews with car buyers (N=39), I have sought to ascertain the determinants of the car-buying calculus and in doing so, to lay bare the socio-technical dynamics of automobile transactions. Putatively disentangled decision-making and -taking is entangled, I argue, with market/power, a neo-Foucauldian neologism emphasizing ways by which the buyer's sense of inferiority acts a focal point of market experience and subjectivity. Becoming economic in the context of an automobile acquisition (or any other major life purchase for that matter) is hence less a matter of optimally formatting one's calculative competencies than of reasonably justifying one's inferiority; of learning, that is, the crucial injunction to stop calculating. Another way of putting it, the market asymmetry that counts most is not the one between the buyer and seller, but rather the buyer and herself."