Matter matters in markets: illuminating dark matter in opioid and weight loss markets

We draw into market studies insights from Karen Barad’s agential realism and pharmaceutical science and technology studies to highlight the liveliness of materials, whose agency can only be understood in and through their relations. With this perspective, we challenge tendencies of human privileging and accounts of easily ‘pacified’ market goods in market studies research. Through the case of two prominent pharmaceutical matters – opioids such as the infamous OxyContin and GLP-1 receptor agonists such as Ozempic/Wegovy, used for weight loss – we demonstrate how material agency in markets is perpetually generative of new interactions and relationships. This generativity extends to the emergence of new markets – including ‘dark’ or illicit ones – which may have been unanticipated by human market shapers. We use the term ‘dark matter’ in a metaphorical sense, highlighting its invisibilities in our own scholarly community: material agency may escape not only the market frames constructed and shaped to ‘pacify’ it, but also our analytical gaze as researchers. Illuminating dark matter’s irrepressible relationality not only highlights the ontopolitics of lively materials in markets but also our own relationalities: the parts we play in the co-production of research and the cuts we make in the market stories we tell.