If you leave Taipei's Chientan subway station and follow the
crowd you will find yourself drawn into the sprawling luminous
chaos and hubbub of Shihlin Night Market. Passing through a
cacophony of overlapping sonic bubbles - fuzzy music from
numerous cheap stereos, microphone amplified vendor
pitches, animated bargaining processes, and the anomalous
sonorous tolling of a buddhist mendicant's bell - you enter into
ever narrower spaces of increasing turbular density which
swirl with strange smells, events, and interchanges.
Streets give way to alley ways tightly packed with
heterogenous merchandise: spices, flowers, clothes, mobile
phones, pets and above all street food. Donuts, sweet pies,
dumplings, noodles, grilled squid, fresh fruit, fried vegetables,
trays of assorted sausages and roasted animal parts
(occasionally recognizable by their necks and feet) compete
for attention with local delicacies such as the infamous 'stinky
tofu,' glazed tomato kebabs, and mysterious tiny seashells
raked back and forth over a grill. Cooking takes place on the
spot while you watch, immediately demonstrating the
nonsegmentation of production, commerce, and consumption.
The market is constructed out of the juxtaposition of different
spaces: covered and uncovered areas, roads, shops of
various sizes, shadowy stalls shrouded by incense-smoke,
dark paths lined with crates of fatalistically somnolent
chickens - even an old taoist temple - find themselves
quasi-amoebically absorbed. The market subverts every
tendency to spatial closure, interiority, or organization.
Adjacent shops and restaurants adapt by losing their rigid
contours, spreading their goods, tables, and activities out onto
the street.
In the market you never know what you might find. The dense
and mazelike market topography encourages something akin
to a 'random-access' distribution of populations and tradable
items, maximizing the number of encounters, or opportunities
for transaction. Crowds meander with a quasi-brownian
motion as they eat, shop, talk, meet, pass through and
wander around, continuously redirected by the intermingling
traffic/traffick for its own sake that constitutes the real life of
the city.
Balancing the desegmentary sprawl of the market is its
tendency toward clustering. This emergent arrangement - one
lane devoted primarily to spices, another to fish, another to
blankets, etc. - fosters intense comparison and automatic
competition. This tendency can even become powerful
enough to carry an entire market-place down a line of
specialized individuation (Hong Kong, for instance, has
particular zones dedicated to a bird market, flower market,
fish market, and computer market). To the citizens of
demarketized capitalist societies - where the basic trend is for
traders to flee competition - there is something almost
incomprehensibly paradoxical about the intrinsic
antimonopolism of spontaneous markets. Why does a
peasant vendor set-up their pile of vegetables right next to a
cluster of similar vendors selling (almost?) indistinguishable
produce? Such practices seem scarcely to distinguish
between cooperation and competition, suggesting that market
immersion breeds a microcommercial culture which itself
constitutes a crucial 'surplus value' (comprising local
knowledges of pitches and techniques, population shifts,
available products, stock-clearing rates, and price-pressures).
The dynamic tension between heterogeneous distribution and
clustering continuously re-energizes the market as a festival
of communication, spiralling tightly into itself, but also folding
out to connect with everything it touches. Despite lacking
specialized organs of publicity and promotion micromarket
vendors are pioneers in transcultural semiotics, hybridizing
tones, hand gestures, and indicative signs with decimal
notation. The arrival of commodity electronics has enabled
them to innovate the usage of cheap calculators as
communication devices (extracting an unanticipated
sociomachinic dividend from what was designed as a private
arithmetical instrument).
Markets like Shihlin can be found throughout the periphery,
and yet - considering how things have turned out in the West it is impossible not to wonder: is this place destined to die?
The most critical conclusion of Fernand Braudel's stupendous
three volume study of the history of capitalism is that there is
a fundamental distinction between markets and the capitalist
order (or "system of the anti-market" married to the state).
Capitalism proper belongs to the politically privileged upper
and core zone of an overall system, establishing a
monopolistic / oligopolistic superstratum upon the diffused
and selectively exploited substratum of market activity. The
popularity, spontaneous innovation, and relative disorder of
markets makes them inconsistent with the geostrategic
economic initiatives and industrial planning favored by the
state (functions that are entrusted to politically well-connected
large-scale businesses). Under the conditions of organized
capitalism 'the market' is associated primarily with the
meta-commerce of stock-trading, whilst 'marketing' is reduced
to a specialized sub-function of large-scale business activity.
Braudel's thesis helps to explain why bourgeois sentiment is
so reliably and instinctively anti-market, despite widespread
pronouncements to the contrary. The more 'developed' a
society becomes the less comfortable it is with market
environments. When compared to uncluttered boulevards and
shops - especially exclusive ones - markets are not very
'nice.' Bourgeois ('civil' or 'polite') society is unanimous in
condemning the dirt, noise, and disorder of concrete markets,
even when it espouses a measure of confidence in abstract
market principles. The state is encouraged to adopt
wide-ranging responsibility for protecting 'the public' from
markets, using the tools of regulation, policing, and urban
planning, which are enforced in the name of safety and
hygiene.
It takes very little to set up a 'stall' at a market place - a
blanket and some merchandise suffices - which enables
markets to spontaneously appear on sidewalks, streetcorners,
and fly-overs, in parks, and underpasses, making them very
difficult to eradicate (and further consolidating their
associations with vermin, nuisance, and disorder). If
metropolitan societies seem to be more readily sympathetic to
pan-handlers than street-traders it is because the former carry
less threat of 'market contamination,' and seems more
amenable to public 'remedy.'
The distinction between the public and the private is a
segmentation internal to capitalism. It is produced as a
function of the long-term strategic reduction of commerce to
'the private sector,' complementing a 'public sector' designed
to manage the population: privatization of markets combined
with the promotion of a public sphere that communicates the
agency of the state. The ideal of rigid public/private
differentiation plays a particularly significant role in antimarket
polemics because it conforms to the basic polarity of
bourgeois aspiration: private wealth and public order. This
desire for clean and orderly public spaces free of commercial
activity is complemented by the endogeneous
anticommercialism of large-scale capital, which subordinates
the culture and space of commercial activity to
concentrational private interest.
In 'highly developed' economies the anarchy of concrete
market-places has been replaced by the securitized space of
the shopping mall (interiorized, guarded, and surveilled).
Instead of dark and crowded alleys, lined by open stalls which encourage a multiplicity of tactile interactions - the mall
substitutes shop windows and brightly lit retail displays. Every
tendency to direct and anonymous contact ('touching the
merchandise') is relayed through the services of eager
attendants, pandering to the sad narcisstic pleasures of
undivided attention, whilst implicitly abolishing the market
requirement for consumer and vendor expertise. As if in
compensation for the disappearance of commercial
transparency, the spontaneous aromatic labyrinth has
become a meticulously planned maze of glass and mirrorized
surfaces, exhibiting a spectacular alliance with the
'mass-marketing' potential of televisual media (whose parodic
underside is the proliferation of CCTV cameras). The hazards
of street food have been triumphantly eradicated by 'food
courts' offering a choice between alternative chains, and by
'supermarkets' (which are not markets at all).
The mall substitutes architectural-teleological structure for the
semi-aimless trajectories of the market, organizing space in
conformity with a programmable segmented order of discrete
activities. Anyone might pass through a market, but the only
reason to be in a mall is to shop (or serve customers), merely
'hanging out' is reconstrued as the illegitimate vagrant activity
of 'loitering.' When teenagers attempt to re-colonize malls, by
treating them as real market-places - or zones of microsocial
coalescence - they trigger a security response. Malls have
become laboratories in which to experiment with strategies for
subtly dissolving 'problem populations.'
As they are squeezed by the twin-claws of urban planning and
mallification markets undergo a peculiar schizoid dissociation
in the cultural unconscious of the West. Their increasingly
alien character entangles them in an unstable mixture of
phobic anxiety and lyrical attachment, which associates them
ever more intimately with the status and practices of
peripheral populations. On the one hand - abstracted and
unified in the imagination - they condense into a monstrous
transcendent power: THE MARKET, the Thing from Outside,
whose inexplicable and unpredictable 'forces' surreptitiously
dominate the earth. On the other, they are hazily integrated
into a wistful orientalism, as exotic tourist attractions (foreign
bazaars and souks), or as anomalous pockets of immigrant
eccentricity.
There is nothing arbitrary about this construction which
constitutes a simultaneous - if fractured - response both to the
autonomous or 'demonic' agency of emergent commercial
singularities, and to their intense alliance with the periphery
(with edges, outer limits, eccentricity, and marginality).
Traders have always operated at the edges, and insofar as
true markets still exist in the West they are primarily produced
and supported by peripheral populations, amongst whom
recent immigrants have a particularly crucial role.
Markets emerge wherever the periphery cuts through a
culture, as a spontaneous consequence of disrupted
centralism, unconstrained communication, and positive
disorganization.
There is undoubtedly a sense in which the repulsive forces of
the metropolitan control-core push whatever disturbs them to
the edges, but there is also a sense in which edges are
everywhere.