{"id":1809,"date":"2021-02-22T14:24:48","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T14:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/?p=1809"},"modified":"2021-03-09T13:44:18","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T13:44:18","slug":"urban-avalanche-crowds-cities-and-financial-markets-crowds-affects-cities-seminar-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/events\/urban-avalanche-crowds-cities-and-financial-markets-crowds-affects-cities-seminar-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Urban Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets (Crowds, Affects, Cities Seminar Series)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Professor Christian Borch, ‘Urban Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets’<\/div>\n
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According to late nineteenth-century crowd theory, modern cities are overwhelmed by crowds that carry away the urban inhabitants. The main mechanism suggested by fin-de-si\u00e8cle sociologists to explain crowd behaviour is that of hypnotic suggestion,\u00a0with people essentially being hypnotized by the crowd leader. This explanatory framework later fell into disrepute and together with it, classical crowd ideas were consigned to the dustbin of social theory. In this talk, I argue for resuscitating parts of the fin-de-si\u00e8cle crowd theorization. First, I argue that the psychotherapy debates that inspired the use of the notion of hypnotic suggestion contain a more nuanced conception of individuality than that of individuals submitting entirely to the hypnotist. Instead, they\u00a0give rise to a notion of \u2018tensional individuality\u2019, according to which individuality is given in a tensional relationship between mimetic features (imitating others) and anti-mimetic ones (some core independence or autonomy). That said, second, in crowd\u00a0situations \u2013 or what I call \u2018social avalanches\u2019 \u2013 mimesis takes over and precisely this possibility constituted a major concern amongst many early twentieth-century urban sociologists, architects and urban planners. I shall discuss this with reference to\u00a0Robert E. Park\u2019s reflections on cities, including how he established connections between crowds, cities and financial markets, in effect seeing the latter as main sites for urban crowd dynamics. Third, and fast-forwarding to the present, I suggest that Park\u2019s\u00a0and others\u2019 recognition of the links between crowds, cities and financial markets deserves renewed attention in the light of current developments towards fully automated trading. Specifically, I suggest that, like urban inhabitants, automated trading\u00a0algorithms are characterized by tensional individuality just as they occasionally avalanche.
Christian Borch is Professor of Economic Sociology and Social Theory at the Copenhagen Business School and the PI of the ERC-funded AlgoFinance research project (http:\/\/info.cbs.dk\/algofinance<\/a>). His latest book is Social Avalanche (Cambridge UP,\u00a02020).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This event is part of the 2020-2021 seminar series Crowds Affects, Cities, jointly convened by the Centre for the History of the Emotions and the QMUL City Centre.<\/p>\n

To register your interest, please contact one of the convenors: Tiffany Watt Smith (t.k.watt-smith@qmul.ac.uk), Regan Koch (r.koch@gmail.com), and Pen Woods (p.woods@qmul.ac.uk) and we\u2019ll send you the Zoom link.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professor Christian Borch, ‘Urban Avalanche: Crowds, Cities and Financial Markets’<\/div>\n
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Wednesday 24th March, 1pm Zoom.
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To register your interest, please contact one of the convenors: Tiffany Watt Smith (t.k.watt-smith@qmul.ac.uk), Regan Koch (r.koch@gmail.com), and Pen Woods (p.woods@qmul.ac.uk) and we\u2019ll send you the Zoom link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1809"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1820,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1809\/revisions\/1820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/projects.history.qmul.ac.uk\/emotions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}