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Paper short abstract

I explore how retail investors make sense of their financial subjectivity via investing apps, using two theory-derived ideal types – singularization and synchronisation of self. While investors present themselves as singularized, they attribute synchronised subjectivity to generalised others.

Paper long abstract

The paper stems from a dissertation project focused on meaning-making around the recent surge in retail investing in the Czech and Slovak post-socialist context. Based on 38 semi-structured interviews with individual lay investors and fieldwork at various investor meet-ups and conferences, it explores how retail investors make sense of their financial subjectivity vis-à-vis the digital investing platforms they use. I interpret the meaning-making through two ideal typical models of subjectivity, coming from opposing theorisations of digital subjectivity–Reckwitz’s singularised subjectivity and Stiegler’s synchronised subjectivity. Singularised subjectivity corresponds with self-responsibilised and self-disciplined neoliberal subjectivity, approaching apps as mere tools or access points, allowing investors to take their financial future into their own hands. The other model sees subjectivity as subjugated, nudged, shaped and ultimately dependent on features of the platform. While research on retail investors and digital platforms shows that their agency is neither fully independent nor subjugated to the platforms they use, the ideal types extrapolated from theory capture the meaning-making dynamics around expressed and attributed subjectivities. While acknowledging the subjugating capacities of the apps, investors tend to present their current subjectivity as singularised and solely responsible for their own decisions, whereas they project the model of synchronised subjectivity onto the generalised mass of hypothetical others. I then discuss this discrepancy between one’s own expressed subjectivity and the subjectivity attributed to others in the broader context of postsocialist capitalism, where neoliberalism arrived as a moralising and civilising project, rendering success or failure a matter of individualised deservingness.