Market Tales: A Geopolyphony by Julia Morandeira

Market Tales â&#x20AC;&#x201D; A Geopolyphony

Charlotte Allen Alaina Chan Blanche Craig Marie Crick Adam Elias Luisa Filippi Zuzana Flaskova Paulina Goodwin Simon Harvey Shama Khanna Alice Lobb Julia Morandeira Yvonne Pawlikowski Irit Rogoff Elena Santaguistina Kate Self Caroline Stevenson Marimar Suarez Lena Theodoropoulou Ashley Wong

Market Tales A Geopolyphony

Introduction

4 Geopolyhony – Spatial and Sonic Mobilities Irit Rogoff 8 A Wave of New Mappings Simon Harvey 10 A Goaded Spirit Alice Lobb & Charlotte Allen

Ethnofictions Introduction – 26 Contents – 28

30 The Value of Authenticity Paulina Goodwin 38 The Incurable Truth Adam Elias

Visibility/ Invisibility Introduction – 102 Lexicon – 103

104 Survival Tactics Zuzana Flaskova

Play of forces Introduction – 121 Lexicon – 122

124 Market Intensity Julia Morandeira

110 “The owner of my bike, works somewhere around that pole....”’ Marie Crick

46 The Internal Life Lena Theodoropoulou 52 (Ex)changing the Quotidian Marimar Suarez The Value of Things Introduction – 62 Lexicon – 64

66 ‘Car Booty’ – Performing Value in the Marketplace Blanche Craig

128 Playing-grounds: Imagined Space and Limitless Possibility Ashley Wong

74 Because of its History: An Exploration into Market Values Kate Self

134 The Market Dandy as Decoy Shama Khanna

80 Fragments: Voices, Objects, Flows and Paths from an Eluding Economy Elena Santaguistina

142 Trusting the Truth as a Fish Out of Water Luisa Filippi

90 What would you Sacrifice? Yvonne Pawlikowski

146 We are Shadows Caroline Stevenson

94 Chinatown Alaina Chan Bibliography 154

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Geopolyphony – Spatial and Sonic Mobilities Irit Rogoff

The attempt to place, to locate and to map requires certain spatial efforts and knowledges. This project undertaken by the 2009 ‘Geographies’ seminar in ‘Visual Cultures’, which aimed at looking at London’s street markets as the sites of constant and fluid mobilities between countries, cultures, languages, legalities, values and relations, seems to have demanded something more of us: an added dimension of thinking space against the grain of location and of understanding the aural as that which might allow us to go beyond certain material boundaries. If the street markets around us provide long lines of connectivity – to places, political and economic crises, circulations of goods, exchanges of languages located at the edges of legalities – then how would we go about understanding their sense of place? If they are forever slipping out of the confines of their specific location, linking us to a set of ‘elsewheres’, and if they embody in themselves modes of circulation, then how can we grasp their material presence without limiting the range of their effects? Initially we tackled this by looking at the relations of stabilities and instabilities. The stabilities we tracked looked at how mapmaking serves as an instrument of establishing a particular mode of order and control of territories, populations, resources, mobilities and locations. Clearly these models of stability are put forward and propped up by geographical, colonial and cartographic discourses. Countering them are the current crop of ‘instabilities’, the dynamics that work towards dismantling the presumed urban, territorial, identity and location based order which cartography seemingly sustains. Prime among these have been both the performative nature of everyday culture on the move, its negotiations and play with dominant signifying systems, as well as the sonic texture of everyday urban environments, which include the building sites, language babble, hawking strategies of informal economies and refusal of the polite and acoustically discrete dominant order. But we also recognised that street markets were far more than the transgressive arena of corporeal resistance – that, in fact, they served as an indexical instance that referenced many things that were neither visible nor directly trackable from within themselves. The performances that are visible by the sellers and buyers within these markets do not always have to do with the direct transaction of goods; sometimes they bring about the establishment of an alternative territoriality, of a sphere of influence that partially enfranchised people cannot aspire to, sometimes they provide the opportunity for the carnevalesque to come into expression and sometimes they are the final point in long and often illegal journeys of both subjects and goods.

introduction

From the outset of the project we recognised that any attempt to capture these complex, fleeting and resistant manifestations would require both another way of thinking as well as another narrative structure and another vocabulary. That the clearly differentiated divisions between fact and fiction, between sovereignty and subjecthood, between legality and illegality that can be maintained in other spheres, could not possibly be sustained here, provided us with an ideal arena from which to operate with our desire to understand what kind of new mobilities globalised economies, and migratory and transient cultures, were confronting us with. As such the ‘Geopolyphony’ project is an exercise in marking and paying attention to the complex circulations of difference, without tying it down to a recognisable signifying system. It reflects ourselves in the classroom, coming from all the places, languages and experiences that we do, as well as the convergences of these within exchange economies in the larger public sphere.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Introduction

A Wave of New Mappings

with the contexts and social realities about and around us, out of which we can make informed and tactical moves and mobilisations. Cartography also has the advantage of a system of ‘scale’ next to which we can proportion the reality of our situation. If our critical consciousness doesn’t work at the vast scale of a map of empire then we can scale down the territory to the locus of our bodies while retaining the knowledge of that other orientation, all within the same language of mapping. Maps have become complex: it is no longer so relevant to ask what a map is, rather what does it do? We are now in the realm of wave dynamics. Rather than admiring waves, or maps, for their appearance we reach out for their performance efficiencies and effects: we consider how in working with them we can accelerate our own trajectories and operate in alliance with them. In enacting ourselves into cartography we can perform an embodied mapping. For anthropologist Tim Ingold, in his book The Perception of the Environment, mapmaking and map-use (plotting a course from place to place) are secondary to mapping as a process.1 The emphasis shifts from location to movement, a human scale passage through a series of vistas rather than an abstract movement in map-space as it is represented to us. Place itself is only constituted through histories of movement. Moving far beyond early work on maps, this more affirmative mapping steps into line with our bodily rhythms. The Spanish word for surfing is tabla. In another creative approach to mapping, James Corner’s ‘The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention’, the map’s performative surface is another kind of tabla; “an operating table... upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, masks, relates and generally explores”.2 This is also the architect’s planning table but, far from being a cold blueprint for a building, it becomes a site of experimentation: all kinds of objects and vectors might pass over and affect this desk and the built environment is just one among many outcomes. It is akin to the moment when the surfer catches the wave, that precarious instant of stability-instability when everything could all go so right or disastrously wrong. The essays in this book are narratives of everyday life, of street markets and embodied social practices in stark contrast to the disembodied consumerist habits of, for instance, surfing eBay. If they are considered as cartographies then they are ones that risk, in Corner’s words a “reworking, assembling, relating, revealing, sifting and speculating”.3 The market has become so much more than its parts, as has contemporary, radical mapping today. Do these two new approaches to cartography represent the perfect wave that map surfers await? It is difficult to say because mapping has become so atuned to speculation; it now has a future orientation. It is no longer simply about the map, it is all about mapping, the ongoing practice. What is certain though is that the problem of cartography has been transformed into the potential of mapping.

SIMON HARVEY

Something of a slow revolution has been happening in the world of mapping. Hitherto cartography has seemed like a branch of antique book collecting, but now words and phrases like ‘the only surviving’ and ‘rare’ have been traded in for adjectives like ‘contemporary’ and ‘radical’. Ce n’est pas.... In the same way that René Magritte’s pipe was, simply put, no such thing, so too the definition of mapping requires a little updating. However, while the radical and contemporary in art practice has sometimes proved a little shallow, change in cartography has come in a series of increasingly powerful waves. Indeed, working with the potential of mapping is rather like being a surfer waiting for something even bigger, but now, perhaps, that optimum break is finally here. All the same, layers of illusion have had to be stripped away during the course of this long wait. The first waves simply stirred up the water. The apparent scientific clarity of cartography, its ‘view from nowhere’, was challenged as early as the 1960s by cartographer and cultural theorist (he resisted the label ‘map historian’) Brian Harley who demonstrated that maps are never either neutral or passive. This deconstructing approach gained impetus during the late 1980s and 90s with postcolonial projects that uncovered the power of maps to distort and divide. Through their colourful representations they assigned territory arbitrarily for the purposes of governance, resettlement and to parcel land off for ease of taxation. More recently this (rather negative) view of the potency of mapping, and its subsequent unveiling, has been put to alternative use by political activists who, through a strategy of counter-cartography reveal patterns of exploitation, as well as connections of resistance to it, that are hidden in prevailing rhetorics of, for instance, migration, trans-national commerce and twentyfirst century war-mongering. But this isn’t quite the wave that those of us who are interested in mapping’s inherent potentiality (rather than adaptability) have been waiting for. A more recent swell, however, shows more promise. Before moving onto one or two examples of more affirmative mapping, perhaps something should be said about why cartography, as a technology and discipline, might be of importance to all of us. First, it is no longer really about the map, but rather it is, precisely, about us. Maps are in-the-world: they are neither simply abstract frameworks nor representations that organise and guide us. However, they do not exist without our participation. They never just present space to us. Nor do they function only as tools, or evidence. Certainly they help us to orientate and navigate, but they themselves only really come into being through our spatial practices. When they orientate us they do so not in the sense of aligning us with a particular marker (be it, for instance, an ideological direction or geopolitical demarcation), but rather they allow us to engage

Ingold, Tim, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, London: Routledge, 2000. Corner, James, “The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention”, Mappings, Dennis Cosgrove (ed.), London: Reaktion Books, 1999, p. 215. 3 Ibid., p. 228. 2

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

introduction

A Goaded Spirit

The open, temporary and semi-informal structure of a street market makes it a unique site for face-to-face interaction. Stall owner Frank does a roaring trade in second-hand goods, a success he puts down to the relationship he has with his customers. He appears to know many of their names and if he doesn’t he charms them with a smile and calls them “darling” or “sir”. Goods are casually reserved for those customers that he knows would have a keen eye for them and he advises his regulars of the best time to come by the stall to snap up the rare items they are after. He watches over his 12-foot pitch and team of helpers from the top of a stepladder dressed in an orange waistcoat and a customised hat. The hat has feathers poked into one side and on top the head of a small doll with its long hair draping to one side, on the front of the hat are written the words “the boss”. The variety of goods on the stall are arranged randomly and without labels or prices. This sales device ensures that he is the centre of the stall’s activity, determining the price of every item and engaging with all his customers. Frank always plays music on his stall too, further evoking a mis-ènscene in which he performs to entertain. This is a personal service increasingly absent from more regulated and formal urban shopping environments, and his approach sees customers return week after week to his stall, sorely disappointed if he doesn’t make an appearance. Marking his territory and clearly defining his role Frank sets up a unique site in which he performs to his customers and allows subjectivity to circulate. One of his customers exclaimed, “Frank is honest, fair and good company. I miss him when he’s not around.” Frank’s rapport with his customers is also encouraged by his satirical sense of humour, he jokes around with them and succeeds in creating a strong and addictive relationship and an easy and informal sales atmosphere in which the unexpected can occur. For example, we witness Frank winding-up a local religious preacher who he refers to as “one of the rare homosexual Christians in Deptford” by saying that Jesus was a homosexual. Frank’s wind-ups usually receive positive attention but, in this instance, the customer seems offended but continues the conversation by challenging Frank’s religious views, particularly when Frank describes himself as “Satan”. It is clear that this isn’t the first time such a confrontation has occurred and the religious man is a regular customer. It seems that both individuals enjoy the free and open space of the market where accepted social boundaries are crossed so as to find new ones that allow for a better understanding of one another. Frank describes his method of interacting with customers as “a way to adapt in a melting pot area, a cosmopolitan space”. At play in the market are social forces from different ideological backgrounds, the site allows them to freely engage and unify organically, creating opportunity for a shared and lived collective experience, even if it is just for one moment. The market is a site of real encounters, conversations between strangers, the convivial loitering around and the fleeting of people produce new possibilities and potential is created. Market officer, John, tells us about the mix of people and events within the market:

Alice Lobb & Charlotte Allen

Deptford Market is an urban street market in the borough of Lewisham in South East London. The open-air market is currently open on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and takes place on the main Deptford High Street and neighbouring roads and squares. The market has existed for centuries and its presence has enabled the high street to resist the influx of chain stores that are familiar in other shopping areas in London. Recognising its uniqueness The New York Times recently described the area and its neighbour New Cross as “an eccentric outpost... with a real edge to it”, recommending it to American tourists as “London’s Wild West”. 1 You can float from one stall to another and pick up a variety of goods old and new; fresh fish, hallal meats, jewellery, household goods, smoked rabbit, fashion bags, books, curtains, ice cream, wardrobes, Thai takeaway and information on the latest health initiatives. The wide range of goods on sale and information available is a result of the diversity of people buying and selling on the market in this truly cosmopolitan area. Many of the traders have been doing business for over 30 years and the mix of cockney rhyming slang and plethora of international languages mean you’ll find it difficult to avoid conversation at Deptford Market, wherever you are from. First hand encounters with individuals on the market provide the basis for our exploration of the unique nature of this site. Through conversations and observations we explore how the market ‘works’ locally and reflects a wider geography. The method of data collection has been suggested by the market itself – as a performance site in which certain realities unfold. Market trader Dave provides the context within which we began our exploration. He has been trading at various London markets for over 15 years and believes Deptford has always been his best earner until recently: “I remember the market used to be full of life, new encounters, new events, now it’s all going down hill, like all the other markets. Look around you no one is here, it’s dead. You wouldn’t believe that only three years ago Deptford was awarded best market of the year by the Evening Standard.” The city as a great melting pot is more simulated than real.2 – AbdouMaliq Simone

Muslim market trader Khalid had a good trade in fashion goods and rubbed along with traders and customers through the usual chat and banter. After September 2001 this atmosphere seemed to change. I remember speaking

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

to Khalid and he told me how upset he was that suddenly he was treated differently, just because of what happened in America. Over time though the relationships improved and things seemed to get back to normal. It would appear that the traders’ attitudes towards Khalid were altered by the events in the US in September 2001. The attacks on the World Trade Center provoked the start of the US and UK’s ‘War on Terror’. The wide coverage of this in the media made people start to look within their own surroundings, driven by the fear that there may be radical Muslim terrorists living or working next door to them. As we discuss later in this essay much of the government’s actions and the media coverage at this time was based on speculation. This story could suggest and indicate the detrimental effects of this within societies, influencing people’s opinions of others and fracturing relationships, including the relationship between Khalid and the other market traders. Networks and organisations like the media and governments have the ability to dissolve the organic relations that would otherwise be produced amongst collectives and individuals in a society and take a form of control over people’s thoughts. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri identify this control as the “politics of communication” arguing that the media doesn’t just influence people’s opinion but imposes its own articulations and language, generalising and coding our thought. This control does not have a centre, but is more like an amalgam of powerful networks participating together through manipulating actions. It can be suggested that the traders opinion of Khalid, was articulated and manipulated through the language of the ‘War on Terror’ which communicates fear – a ‘politics of fear’ – that controlled the opinion of those not just in the market, but worldwide. Of course we only have one side of the story here and perhaps Khalid did or said something in particular that made the traders treat him differently but something changed over time and ‘things got back to normal’. It would appear that the ‘fear’ and ‘suspicion’ created by the media dissolved through the unique socially productive space of the market. As Hardt and Negri explain: “Only a space that is animated by subjective circulation and only a space that is defined by irrepressible movements (legal or clandestine) of individuals and groups can be real.”3 The eventual retreat back to an amicable relationship would suggest a return to the traders true beliefs, based on real experience, because the market is a unique site where subjectivity can flow. The market site is a place where in a ‘more simulated city’, the real can still be found. Empire is the ultimate form of biopower, in so far as it is the absolute inversion of the power of life.4 – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Street trading in London is currently practised under the 1990 London Local Authorities Act. “It is for the overall good of everyone, for fairness” market officer Nick told us. The

introduction

act aims to regulate the space, commodities and time of the market, these are mainly controlled by the licence of the market trader.5 Nick tells us that it was introduced “to prevent activities such as money laundering and the sale of illegal goods”. The issue and regulation of licences enables the surveillance of both goods and traders. The act also restricts advertising the market, permitting only limited marketing to potential traders. Nick told us that the reason for this is to prevent the poaching of customers from other markets, explaining that “it’s a shame because it prevents the development of the market and because it is a not-for-profit organisation, which is a rule for markets which are owned by councils, we have no funds to support any marketing or ideas we have”. These regulations prevent traders from monopolising the markets and restrict a truly ‘open’ market. A comparison with high street shopping, in which streets in towns across the country become full of the same retail brands, and can advertise and reinvest revenue back into the expansion of the business, highlights the contradictions of these two trading places that exist within the same neo-liberal economy. As Nick observes “it keeps the market traders as the little men”. The regulations of the market do not just restrict who can trade and what they can sell, but also who they can attract to the market and therefore the potential income of the space. This is a restriction not imposed in formal shopping environments so we could say that the street market is over-regulated, restricting its growth. What are the potential benefits that the traders can gain from this regulation and who else is benefiting from it? What is its relationship to the traders, the public and formal shopping environments? Walking down the main trading area with Nick the usual throughway is blocked by a crowd of excited people, they appear to be trying to see something. As we get closer we can hear the sound of a stereo and a man’s voice rapping over the top. Amongst the commotion we realise that the market is being used as the backdrop for a music video. Suddenly Nick is accosted by a nearby trader who moans, “Nick, this isn’t on. It’s not doing our business any good, look at them taking up all this space and everyone crowding around, all of the noise, people in the way!” Nick explained that they must have had permission from the council office. This complaint from the trader suggests a reliance on the regulations and regulators of the market for the success of their business, one example of many we discovered in which traders depend upon the market officers to alleviate specific problems. Nick tells us: “We get this all the time, the whinging and the moaning from the traders, they argue between themselves, that one has too much space or is selling similar goods to them and that ‘it isn’t fair’, or that the other stall is being too loud and is distracting the customers, it never ends.” When asked what would happen without these rules and regulations, Nick suggested: “It would be anarchy out there.” The irony of this statement made us contemplate the possibility of the situation. Perhaps he was right, if they were left to their own devices, without relying on the governance of the market officers a new mode of self-organisation would emerge. But in a collective of small businesses whose aim is to make a profit what sort of self-organisation would be possible? As Nick said “there are some very good businessmen in the market, but they’re out for themselves. They’d do each other over if they could.” Do the regulations imposed on the market help prevent this? Nick’s comments suggest that without them it would be chaos, because

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each trader is driven by the need to make profit there needs to be regulations in place to create a sense of democracy. Becky’s stall is visited by a trading standards officer who inspects her electrical goods on sale to ensure they meet required health and safety guidelines. He’s happy that the 1980s-style lamp for sale has its regulatory plug label, but insists that there should be a label on its cable and come with instructions for use. She rolls her eyes and mutters: “Daft regulations! It’s a second-hand stall not John Lewis!” Trader Bill, who works on the stall next-door to Becky, explained that the extent of these regulations has seen a 40 per cent decrease in the products and goods they are allowed to sell over the 28 years he has traded, “these regulations are slowly but surely squeezing us”. The insistence on goods meeting health and safety guidelines that apply in retail environments, like John Lewis, means that the market traders are subject to the regulation of such formal environments but are not able to fully compete with them for custom because of the way in which regulation restricts advertising. Nick tells us that it is the traders who help produce a regulated space: “They ask for help these traders, so to make it fair and equal we have these rules. They don’t understand the rules and regulations in place are for them and because of them!” The traders demand and desire rules and regulations through their voices and their actions, through their moaning and squabbling, and in turn produce these regulations themselves, reinstating the need for them through repeated behaviour. In this way the regulations are authorised by them, they are self-authorised. This demonstrates Foucault’s notion of ‘biopower’ where rules and regulations are produced through bodily desires and demands, through the ‘power of life’.6 Paradoxically, these regulations then control the actions of populations, like market traders, and we witness the ‘inversion of the power of life’. Ironically the traders then dispute and resist the controls produced as it ‘squeezes them’ – restricting what they can sell, the noise levels and use of space etc.. The regulations in place are then justified through the desire for democracy, ‘to make it fair and equal’ for all traders. It is important to note that these self-producing regulations are perpetually reproduced not only through the action of the traders. John recalls a situation that flabbergasted him, where he had to step in for the “sake of public safety”:

experience. The street market is not free of the influence of these manipulating networks and the formation of John’s knowledge appears to be controlled by them. Regulation and the media seem to play a role in disempowering the individual. The market is a collective of single businesses in an environment regulated by rules. The regulations protect the traders from each other and the public from dangerous goods, as in a formal shopping environment. Both the traders and the public produce the need for this regulation through their own behaviour. In comparison with formal shopping environments street markets are also over-regulated, restricting their growth. However, regulation could be considered to play a role in actually maintaining the uniqueness of the market, if we could imagine what would happen if these markets were to be monopolised by one individual or became generic throughout cities, then we could imagine a loss of the unique character of individual markets. The restriction of growth because of regulation could be seen to be an advantage of the marketplace, keeping the businesses small and run by individual stallholders that help create a unique shopping environment. How else does regulation operate in the market? John explains that they have to work hard to keep goods like fake cigarettes and alcohol out of the market:

I was doing my rounds the other week and I couldn’t believe what I saw on this stall, a samurai sword for sale. I looked around the stall and she had a small dagger too. ‘Are you completely stupid, don’t you read the newspapers or watch the TV, do you know about knives and daggers, do you realise it’s not such a good idea to have these weapons on the stall?’ I said. She honestly looked at me like I was from another planet. Sometimes it seems that common sense goes out of the window in the market. Has the strict regulation of goods reduced the individual’s ability to make ‘common sense’ judgments? In this statement John relies on the media to produce an explanation of the danger of these items rather than using knowledge gained through first-hand

You just don’t know what’s in them and having goods like that attracts more nasty people selling illegal goods, it’s for the benefit of the public. We get complaints from the customers of the market when they buy things and they are broken, or not up to scratch, demanding their money back or a guarantee. I have to explain that markets don’t work like that. We have to protect the public from faulty dangerous goods. A few years ago there was a sudden influx of illegal Asian immigrants in the market, selling pirate DVDs and dodgy kids’ toys. I confiscated a bag of small toy dogs from a guy who wouldn’t leave, they were all spiky and had tiny batteries in them that could be swallowed, they were so dangerous. He begged me to give them back; it was his livelihood I suppose. He wanted them back because without them he would return to his boss empty-handed and would probably not be given more work. John removed the goods from the market to ‘protect the public’ but where did this action leave the seller? Suggesting that he returns to “his boss”, implies an awareness of a network of illegal sellers that exists in-between the lines of formalities. Regulation of the street market does not prevent such activity it only marginalises and displaces it, pushing it underground. These black markets expand and contract as the regulation and policing of more formal markets takes place. This non-preventative mode of regulation exists on a local and global scale. The international market in human organs is a black market that those who fight for their salvation are subject to. In monthly online magazine wired.com, Scott Carney reports on the massive police crackdown on the sale of organs in India that sent shock waves through the “international organ market”. Surgeon K.C. Reddy ran a clinic that performed thousands of kidney transplants, making sure donors were well compensated and cared for, but because of the increased policing was forced to close.

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The surgeon argues “it is far better to accept, regulate and contain the malpractice in the organ trade rather than to legislate against it – this will only drive the business underground to the ultimate detriment of the donor and the patient”.7 Reddy’s statement acknowledges that black markets expand and contract as a result of the regulation and policing and highlights that illegal activity is not eradicated by regulation but displaced. The customers and the legitimate street traders of the market are protected by regulation but those displaced are not, instead they can be criminalised. Those who can’t participate in formal regulation and rules can appear as criminal and therefore further legitimise the policing of spaces and give power to those to control what activity takes place. In the market, inspectors, officers and the police have the power to control aspects of activity within their territory. John calling these people that do not conform to market regulations “nasty people” categorises them not just as unable to sell, but assumes something more about them, based not on any real evidence but speculation, it assumes that they are a threat to the general public, as if criminal. John can justify excluding people such as the toy seller from the marketplace because it prevents these threatening people returning “attracting more nasty people selling illegal goods”. There is a double method to this as he uses both regulation and criminalisation, alluding to the public safety, to evict these sellers from the marketplace. Both work as a tool of control to evict these people. This tool of control is not just practiced in the market but in places globally. Strategies of ‘criminalisation’ are common on a larger scale and have been investigated in many forms. For example it has been suggested that the US and the UK used this strategy for the ‘War on Terror’. After the attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001 they sent troops to Afghanistan to fight and destroy the terrorist network Al Qaeda. Claiming for a need to protect the public from more deadly attacks legitimated this. Al-Qaeda is defined by the politicians and the media as a hierarchical terrorist network existing all over the world, however, based on firm research Jason Burke’s book Al-Qaeda and Adam Curtis’ documentary series The Power of Nightmares argue that Al-Qaeda does not exist and is a construction forced through the imagination of politicians, a myth.8 Curtis pursues this argument further by suggesting that their attacks on Afghanistan, were really an attempt to compose the various forces of nationalism by neo-conservatives, citing the fact that between September 2001 and Autumn 2004 none of the 664 alleged terrorists arrested in relation to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center have been convicted of operating as part of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. This technique “is an exaggerating perception of a possibility of terrorism that’s quite disabling”, explains Bill Durodie, Director of the International Centre for Security Analysis, and describes it as the “preventive paradigm and the precautionary principle; imagine the worst without any evidence”. This principle also highlights what is practiced on a micro-scale at the market. The officers regulate the space through precautionary principles “tiny batteries that could be swallowed” or “attracting more nasty people”, are reasons used to eradicate undesirable people, in the same way that politicians utilise them on a macro-level. Their actions, removing immigrants and goods from the market or invading Afghanistan are both justified as being “for the sake of the public”. These actions in turn, as Hardt and Negri explain,

“isolate, divide and segregate” and are attempts to “restrict and isolate the spatial movements of the multitude to stop them from gaining political legitimacy”, be it the DVD sellers in the markets or the so-called global terrorists that pose a threat to the nation state and public safety.9 Our encounters with the market have allowed us to explore the complex dynamics of regulation. The partially self-authorised mechanism that produces regulation means the market is caught in a matrix of perpetual regulation that aims to preserve itself and be fair and equal for all. There appears to have also developed a sense of over-reliance on these regulations that removes the individual’s ability to think for themselves and participate collectively, reducing their potential to act. Unfortunately the market and its traders have become over-regulated leaving them susceptible to other forces of control, including control that is justified through criminalisation and the protection of the public, but this does not address the issue of those excluded it only displaces them. If those that are repetitively displaced could participate in the market, it may allow for more subjectivity to flow and result in a greater social production and organisation. Although there seems to be an attempt to preserve the unique characteristics of the market this development of ‘over-regulation’ also seems to be ‘squeezing’ these businesses and causing the market to decline. Becky illustrates this confusion by saying “I don’t get it, it seems like they want to help us and then they go in at the other end and kill it”. What is clear is that we are beginning to lose a site that encourages an organic social production and a shared collective experience. We live in the age of the City, the city consumes us. It is for this reason that we glorify it.10

– Ononkome Kome Deptford is currently being regenerated. The plans include building a new swimming pool, primary school, public library, key worker homes, outdoor seating, new residential blocks and improved transport facilities. Lewisham Council describe the changes as part of their “strong commitment to the future of Deptford Town Centre as a great place to live and work, to shop and to spend leisure time” but the process is causing concern for the local market traders.11 The main fear is the introduction of controlled parking zones that will restrict the areas they can park in and see the introduction of charges for both traders and customers. The new plans also restrict the type of vehicles that can be parked “so that less vans can be parked in the area, in a bid to aestheticise the place, make it look prettier” was the view of market officer Nick. Trader Bill recognises “why would you come here when you can shop at Tesco or Asda, get everything under one roof and park for free?”. They are also concerned about the practicalities of the designs. Part of the development has already taken place and the shortfalls of the design have been observed by both the traders and market officers. John notes that the expensive marble

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material used for the flooring has oil stains from the market vans that park there and the new buildings have created a wind tunnel, causing rubbish to collect in the square. When asked about the relationship between market traders and the Council, Becky, who is also vice chairman of the National Market Traders Federation, told us: “We meet with them, they ask us what we think and we meet the developers. We usually walk out of those meetings arguing. The thing is when the developers show us these plans they’ve already made their minds up, they’ve already decided what they’re going to do, they don’t listen to us.” Although there is evidence of attempts from the developers to inform their plans with knowledge from the people who use the spaces, through public exhibitions and meetings, the reaction of both traders and market officers suggest that there seems to be a strategy for the development of this urban area that imposes plans rather than finding out the needs of the area through the local inhabitants. AbdouMaliq Simone identifies this as a common global urban phenomenon “instead of taking what people are actually doing – their initiatives, desires, and ways of organising themselves – as the material through which urban life is to be developed there is a static sense of what the city ‘needs’”.12 Here we consider how the ‘needs’ of cities are identified through looking at other urban spaces. In Planet of Slums Mike Davis highlights Alan Jacquemin’s study of the Mumbai region to demonstrate the way in which municipal governments in developing countries are forced to distance themselves from their local responsibilities:

sharp cuts to public services.15 Are Lewisham council’s actions prescribed by the overall ‘needs of the city’ of London and not its individuals? Investigating London’s approach to the regeneration of a borough similar to Lewisham, enables us to examine a model similar to global regeneration programmes in which local needs are ignored to satisfy wider demands. Take Broadway Market, a street in the London Borough of Hackney where the Council’s debt, coupled with the desire to regenerate the area, has led the council to sell off public-owned property in the street to private developers. As a result two tenants have been forced to leave their place of business, which they had previously rented off the council at affordable rates. Tony, former tenant of the café tells his story:

[Alan Jacquemin] emphasises the confiscation of local power by local authorities, whose role is to build modern infrastructures that allow the wealthier parts of poor cities to plug themselves – and themselves alone – into the world cyber-economy. These authorities, he writes, ‘have further undermined the tasks and functions of democratically elected municipal governments already weakened by the loss of sectoral responsibilities and financial and human resources to special ad hoc authorities’. No wonder locally expressed needs at the municipal and neighbourhood level remain unheard.13 City governments in developing countries neglect local responsibilities as external organisations control them through monetary driven schemes. The pressure to ‘plug into a global cyber-economy’ means they develop at an exponential rate, motivated by the fear of being poor and left behind. For example Uganda, a country in the midst of an HIV/AIDS crisis, spends 12 times more per capita on debt relief than on healthcare each year. In Mexico informal employment almost doubled between 1980 and 1987 while social expenditure fell to half its 1980 level.14 These countries are totally converged into the global capital system, sucked in by inescapable forces. Here we ought to consider if London, as a global financial city, is under the same sort of pressure? Although not a ‘developing country’ is it under pressure to produce and create new capital? The current situation would suggest this as in April 2009 it was announced that, due to the accumulation of debt created by the current financial crisis, 2009–2010 would include

I worked there for over 30 years; it was my home, my livelihood, and my life. The café was a place of community, I knew everyone there and they knew me. I paid an honest rent and made a good living out of it. Then suddenly we were told the council were to sell it off. I wasn’t even asked if I wanted to buy it, nor was I offered the help to buy it, instead it was sold to a private developer and I was kicked out. I lost my job, my life, everything, and almost fell apart because of it. Without the support of the local community I wouldn’t have pulled through. We protested for months about this, squatted the café until someone would listen. It made no difference we were evicted in February 2006 and the site has stood empty ever since. Broadway Market is an example of the pressures of the ‘world cyber economy’ repeatedly demanding monetary outcomes to the detriment of local needs. The council are happy though because Broadway Market, with its organic street market on Saturdays, continues to attract more people and increase its status as a London tourist attraction. In documentary The Battle for Broadway Market, 2006, Betty, a local 70 year old lady, speaks of how she now feels isolated and alienated in an area she has lived for years: “Broadway Market has become a trendy spot for the young middle class and I can’t afford the loaves of bread at the market that are almost four pounds.”16 These regeneration schemes inflate prices and the cost of living and seem to push local people out. Although there is no evidence that Deptford Market will be privatised it is managed as non-profit by the council making it susceptible to the risk of privatisation. The way in which some local needs are ignored and spaces designed around these ‘grand-master-plans’ is replicated in Deptford Market, and doesn’t go unnoticed by the market traders and local communities, who recognise the council’s desire to attract more money to the area. The plans are seen by many locals as a bid to push them out, replaced by young middle class groups with greater disposable income. As noted by one trader: “They put up these new flats around the corner from the market, nice flats too. But those people aren’t interested in Deptford Market, they come out of their flats and turn left to Greenwich, to the nicer area.” Regeneration involves the commoditisation of spaces designated for specific use. ‘Over here’ is your supermarket, ‘over there’ is where the children play, ‘here’ is where

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inroduction

you can enjoy an Italian coffee in the lovely piazza. The council aim to attract these new residents to spend money in Deptford by creating specific aestheticised spaces defined for social and commercial use. The regeneration plans include changing the current Giffin Square into a plaza with a new café, outdoor seating and a performance space. Although some of these defined spaces allow for social interaction it is defined and ruled by the objective qualities of that space. This management of space controls its population as spaces become homogenised and strictly defined by their use, attracting a specific type of person. There is much bureaucratisation and an emphasis on the predictable outcomes of these spaces, decreasing the potential for the bizarre, odd or unexpected, or of experimentation and exploration and shared arbitrary events. It reduces the possibility of organic social relations that produce new articulations through a diverse mix of people, enabling the production of social beings resulting in their own control over the knowledge they have of each other and themselves – not dictated by the media or objective spaces for example. Although it is possible to identify positive outcomes of regeneration such as increased employment and improved amenities for local communities it cannot be ignored that some local voices are not listened to and can result in their displacement from the area. There needs to be a strategy to address these issues that contemplate why they are occurring in the first place, the need to ‘glorify the city’ may be one answer as we have just explored. The regeneration of Deptford Market is only just beginning so we are unable to discover how it will actually affect the area through only our encounters. But through studying trends on different scales, in different countries and another London borough it possible to suggest that they are all under the same pressure of the world economy to produce. We can foresee that the shortfalls of the regeneration will be similar, that local needs are not always prioritised and result in a decline of mix of individuals with different ideological backgrounds.

appealing to their desires, be it for the traders or public safety and the benefits of regeneration? It is difficult to remove yourself from a matrix you produce. These forces of control – regulation through the appeal of democracy and money-led incentives – are part of the construction that our history has bought us, a history since the Enlightenment based on power that has a hegemonic effect. Similar to Imperialism, but without a central control, it exists instead through a network of forces both visible and invisible. Through finding an articulation of our own being, we begin to break down these forces and rupture the status quo discovering new histories that allow us to conceive of one which ‘authorises differentiation’. Being individuals in a collective lived experience allows those who are displaced and marginalised to find a voice for their ‘political-social existence’. Although sites like street markets are folding and converging under pressure from these forces ruptures are occurring. The current global financial crisis is evidence of this. The very conditions, in which capital is created, in theory a perfect free market economy, have caused its faults to be revealed. In practice it is imperfect and as it cracks we will begin to experience the reality of its flaws and unpredictability. Transformation through praxis is taking place and new articulations are being formed. Through embodied knowledge it is possible to find a new language where we rule over our own being, a new spirit that re-empowers individuals.

We must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorises differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many.17

– Paolo Virno Trader David told us, “if you stand here long enough you’ll watch the whole world go by”. It certainly felt like that after all of our encounters with Deptford. There still appears to be a unique space for organic social production. For example Frank and his performative site where socially accepted boundaries are pushed and new ones found, breaking forms of control such as the media that subvert embodied knowledge. However, regeneration schemes reduce this opportunity for organic social production and control through over-regulation seem to cause a decline of markets like Deptford and make people like Frank, the mix of people and the unique events of these sites disappear. But how does one escape something that is justified in virtue of

Lanyado, Benji, The New York Times [online], 22 March 2009: http:// travel.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/ travel/22surfacing.html 2 Simone, AbdouMaliq, ‘Globalizing Urban Economies’, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002, p. 115. 3 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, Empire, London: Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 362. 4 Ibid, p. 346. 5 For full details of the act see The Greater London Authorities Act, 1990. 6 Foucault’s concept of biopower is outlined in Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1977–1978 (Michael Foucault Lectures at the College De France) Arnold I. Davison (ed.), Graham Burchell (trans.), Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 7 Carney, Scott, ‘Black market

scandal shakes India’s ban on organ sales ‘, wired.com, 5 August 2007: http://www.wired.com/medtech/ health/news/2007/05/india_ transplants_main?currentPage=2

DeptfordTownCentre/ 12 Simone, AbdouMaliq, ‘Globalizing Urban Economies’, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition, Catalogue, 8 See Jason Burke, Al Qaeda: Casting Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: a Shadow of Terror, I.B. Tauris, 2004, Hatje Cantz, 2002, p. 115. 13 Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, and Adam Curtis, The Powers of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of London: Verso Books, 2006, p. 69. 14 These statistics are quoted Fear, BBC2, Autumn 2004. 9 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio from Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Negri, Empire, London: Harvard pp. 153–157. 15 For full details of the 2009/10 University Press, 2000, p. 398. 10 Kome, Ononkome, ‘Writing the budget see http://www.ft.com/ Anxious City: Images of Lagos in cms/s/2/b20bb3c6-3102-11deNigerian Home Video Films’, Under 8196-00144feabdc0.html 16 James, Emily, The Battle for Siege: Four African Cities – Freetown Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Okwui Broadway Market, 2006. For Enwezor et al. (eds), Ostildern-Ruit, a copy of this documentary 2002, p. 316. please contact James Bayliss11 The full plans for Deptford’s Smith: www.youtube.com/ regeneration can be viewed online jamesbaylisssmith 17 Virno, Paulo, A Grammar of at: http://www.lewisham.gov. uk/Environment/Regeneration/ the Multitude, Semiotext (e), 2004. DeptfordAndNewCross/

Ethnofictions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Collection of short stories

Markets Tales â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

a dv e r t i s i n g ( u n ) m a s k i n g m a p p i n g ru l e s ( u n ) r e gu l at ion e v e y day l i f e m e ta phor au then ticit y bl indspotk now l edge adv e rt i s i n g ( u n ) m a s k i n g m a p p i n g ru l e s ( u n ) E T H NOF IC T ION S r egu l atione v ey day l ifemeta phor au the A Collection of Short Stories n ticit y bl indspotk now l edge a dv ertisin g ( u n ) m a s k i n g m a p 2009 p i n g ru l e s ( u n ) r e g u l Paulina Goodwin | Adam Elias au thenticit ationev eydaylifemetaphor Lena Theodoropoulou | Marimar Suarez y bl i n dsp ot k now l e dge a dv e rt isi ng(u n) m a s k i n g m a p p i n g ru l e s ( u n ) r e g u l at i o n e v ey day l ifemetaphor au then ticit y bl in d sp o t k now l e d ge a dv e rt i si ng ( u n ) m a sk i ngm a ppi ngru l e s(u n)r egu l at ion e v e y d ay l ifemetaphor au then ticit y bl indspot k n ow l e d g e a dv e r t i s i n g ( u n ) m a s k i n g m appingrul es(u n)r egul atione v ey day l ife metaphor au thenticit yblindspotk nowl pp edge a dv ertisingask ingm appingr u l es(u n)r egu l at ione v e y day l if e meta ph or au thenticit yblindspotknowledge ad palm publications

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

Introduction

How can a dialogue navigate through multiple voices across multiple stories? This collection of market stories is an example of our common navigation. Our continuing collaboration has produced not a singular text but characters, objects, a location and a discourse that weave through polyphonous stories. Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State was a catalyst for our journey into fiction. An aesthetic event that maps state power through ethnofiction, blurring research and riddle to negate any classical yearning for evidence. The author is implicated, the reader seeks their own truth and form is instrumental to content. The state mythologises history, works to solidify metaphor and the book works to unmask such ‘truths’. The characters of our stories become the symbols and the objects of these masked-unmasked ‘truths’. Fiction becomes our tool for analysing the fictional nature of reality. Through fiction we negotiate social dynamics, economic regimes and power structures that evolve in the space of the market. A space to inhabit, conquer, define and re-define. Our markets are not merely tools to illustrate ‘otherised’ spaces. Instead they offer an approach to exposing the fabric of pretense imbedded in more formal economies. Why is authenticity valuable? Who and what is authentic? Who decides and how? If value is inherently linked to space and authenticity to predetermined perceptions of the ‘other’, how do the two interject in a field of instability? Their stabilised forms in more regulated spaces rely on proof and certification, be it for migrating objects or people. Metaphors masked as literalities. The space of instability does not offer alternative labels but unmasks a secret that reverberates past its porous boundaries. A tourist object outside the tourist site negotiates our plain. Many of these questions find themselves being asked across various different markets. Where/how does one position oneself in asking such questions about markets that exist without a site of permanence? Are divided notions of truth to be found reaching across a multitude of perspectives and from a variety of non-spaces that simultaneously host the performance of a market? Living in a world where people are the ultimate commodity and the disparity between price and value has become conflated, how does the

remapping of a fact based fiction manifest the dynamics of the market as microcosm? What is the difference between two observers that hold different positions in the same space? The notion of hidden informalities implies an observer whose position defines these informalities as hidden. Can knowledge and truth be accepted as unstable notions, depending on the context of each person‘s value system? How far can a tacit agreement go? How much can informality be tolerated? Through the performance of everyday life, rules are interpreted and transformed, creating a tension between formality and informality. This process creates and re-creates, balances and un-balances the realities constructed in relation to space. The possibilities of this game are related to a broader context; how different are the effects of tacit norms between informalities in London and the ‘third world’ that Mike Davis refers to in Planet of Slums? By contaminating fact, theory and fiction, the dialogues within and about these stories contribute to delineating possible answers to broader questions, navigating between the micro and the macro, the real and the fictional.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

Contents

30 The Value of Authenticity

by Paulina Goodwin

46 Internal Life

by Lena Theodoropoulou

metaphor symbolic of a wider meaning for the vehicle holds more weight than

production of knowledge a process that leads to the perception of information

the subject. A play of language that makes a into b, poetically not literally. ► dead metaphor a metaphor dies when it ceases being poetic and becomes absorbed into ‘normal’ language. The state formalises metaphors through mimesis making them concrete and classified, like money and passports. As language is dynamic dead metaphors are unstable, alive for those from outside the norm who unmask and re-ignite their poetics.

and the generation of concepts, depending on the current historical, cultural, and technical theoretical context, on the identity of the individual involved, as well as on other unbalanced factors, such as taste and judgment. Knowledge is thus connected to interpretation and to the position occupied by the observer.

authenticity dictates value. Relates not to the subject(s)/object(s) being defined

but to the person/society that is doing the defining, an authentic experience of the ‘other’ driven by fantasy. The confirmation of a preconception creates an authentic object, culture or being as does its geographic location. 38 The Incurable Truth

blind spot no matter in which position an individual stands, there is always a

space that remains invisible and can only be seen by an observer that occupies a different position; this new position generates a new blind spot, in another domain. “The observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.”1 There is no such thing as the stability of the gaze. 52 (Ex)changing the Quotidian

by Marimar Suarez

by Adam Elias everyday life quotidian daily praxis through which subjects project their standing

advertising can create narratives that reinterpret our daily lives, operating

behind a thinly veiled attempt to persuade, bribe and sell. It is a form of communication that inflates speculative value, escalating the significance of fact-less conjecture.

in the world; depending on the level of informality and its correspondent power structures, they perform a way into or out of a regulated system, moving through different levels of marginality. ► everyday imaginary use of the space based in a fantasy, a constructed reality that defines it as a place of freedom.

(un)masking meta-theatricalities may help one reveal the ground from which to

read the formality from the informality (and vice versa), rather than rendering two as opposites. Invisible aspects of the macro that are not fully manifest can be revealed from within the micro. mapping fragments of events that cannot be mapped out in one’s head can be mapped out in writing/through narrative revealing polymorphous analyses, whilst avoiding the production of subject as a singularity. rules tapping-up is the practice of trying to attain something or someone under contract without the express permission of those who currently own the thing or person.

(un)regulation negotiation of the rules in a regime, through tacit or explicit agreements; adaptation of pre-existing rules into a wide range of illegality and informality. ► (un)regulated space the inhabitation of the space produces a balance and mutual constitution between informality and formality – one defines the other by trying to take part in the system or by tolerating it as its opposite. 1 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, London: Roultledge, 2002, p. 4.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

The Value of Authenticity Paulina Goodwin

Preface

“We could start business here! Buying stuff up at car boots and jumbles to sell in London. All crap in Devon is gold here.” The passing glance of a stranger made her daughter note the volume. She was petite with reddish hair, dyed, a childlike tone to her voice suggested hope and excitement. “I wouldn’t have the time.” “I was joking”, she said, “you don’t have to take everything so literally. I just meant it’s funny. Works the other way too. Look at these books all a pound regardless of size or condition. The Greek garden book I bought would have cost at least four quid in Devon. Every little helps as they say.” She giggled. As her fingertips caressed that only too familiar pile of stuff, slipping between mismatched crockery, old toys and wood shavings, she let her hand linger on its smoothness. It was heavier than she expected and, luckily, a little dirtier. “This is a funny chap, what is he?” she asked playfully as she squinted her right eye at the unkempt trader. “Easter Island love god or something. Bloke I got it from likes travel.”

“How much?” “Fiver love.” “Orgh that’s a lot. Three pounds?” She smiled as she lowered it into the shade. “Where you from? You Russian?” “Yes! That’s a good guess! I always carry a label, ‘Danish’ or ‘French’ or…” “Your accent’s faint. Brother’s missus is Russian so I know you see. Four love. Thanks.” She didn’t hang around to chat; as they walked away she explained that the dirt gave her bartering power, as if the 30 seconds cleaning time needed to be factored into the price. She was a dab hand at bargain hunting, her house clad head to toe in antiques and collectables, and anything else that took her fancy. The daughter was always suspicious of the flirting, too quick to deride her mother. “I think he meant it’s a fertility statue. It’s quite phallic isn’t it? I remember seeing things like that before, I think they are as hard to come by as Yeltsin sober.” “You sure? I reckon you find those replicas everywhere!” “Maybe. I don’t know. It’s nice wood and heavy. There’s a symbol and some Spanish on the base too. I don’t think this is just some tacky souvenir. Jewel of my day!” “You can get classy souvenirs too. Yes, sorry it’s nice. It reminds me of Dada stuff, I guess that was ripping off Polynesian art anyway.” She gave it to her daughter. “Heavy. Might be worth something.” “It’s not for selling on.” She stopped near a box marked ‘old crap’, “look, I have this suspicion it may be Mexican or something like that. Or, it may be from Yugoslavia. You never know. Funny it shouted at me. Russians, we love these cult images, icons, this kind of thing and in a way it is Russian. Because it’s the style of thing that exists in Russia.” Her phone rang. “Hello. Yes. Very nice. National Gallery and a head massage. Oh it was so good.… Wonderful. Where are we?” The daughter, momentarily distracted by something, turned her attention back to the mother, “sorry?”. She gave a reassuring smile, “that ahm... that market…. Yes. Jumble. A book on Greek gardens, a little silver spoon and a fertility statue. Rare I think. Yes! It’s charming!

“I have in mind… something else as well – namely the evocation of a fictive nation-state in place of real ones so as to better grasp the elusive nature of stately being. After all it is not only the writer of fiction who fuses reality with dreamlike states.” “… you don’t have to take everything so literally.” I start my preface with a quote from the preface of another. And a quote from an elsewhere. People say good fiction is grounded in reality, write what you know they say. But what do I know and about whom? That as much depends on what you know. Our very being in the world, how we see or are seen is a murky affair. Always performing, the real is really made up they say. Things are afflux. Location acts indexically to the value of not just things but beings. Identities change as they navigate spaces and tongues. Being in the world, the most wonderful of metaphors. •

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Ethnofictions

Seven…. Seven O’Four, Whimple. Yes. See you.” She always seemed to prefer the jumbles and car boots. Aside from the cheapness there was something quaint about them. A wider sense that the objects had a human past, something that the sanitised markets like Borough lacked. The daughter inherited her adopted British appreciation of imperfection and old-fashioned value for money and so embellished each visit with a trip to London’s ‘lesser’ markets. The slightly chaotic odds and sodds stalls displayed an array of second-hand fancies that offered endless personal histories, adventures and escape. “Russian” she said matter of factly. “What?” “Russian.” The daughter looked to where her eyes now focused, on a suited man who seemed curiously out of place. “London’s the new Moscow it seems!” “You’re probably right. Who else would wear a suit like that on a Saturday!” “He’s quite handsome. Animal magnetism. Strong Slav jaw and those blue eyes. He looked at you, you know.” “It’s alright Mama you can have him.” The daughter smiled as she kissed her on her forehead. “Ohrgh. Too old.” She had just the one Russian friend in Devon, whom she shared little in common with, and a whole set of unlikely acquaintances that she enjoyed seeing on the circuit. The car-booting started off as an interest but quickly turned into a need, some bad business decisions and a hefty mortgage pulled the purse strings tighter than she’d ever experienced under Communism. “I never bought a single thing second-hand in Russia. It was all new.” She’d come to the conclusion that the newness and formality of shops made things boring. “Don’t get me wrong I’d shop in Harrods any given day but it’s the little things. The unusual things.” She liked a feather mask, but she liked it more because “the girl selling it said she got it at the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. That’s exciting.” Lovely scantily clad bodies perspiring all around its vibrant feathers. “It’s not just the second-hand nature of things but the contact.” The seller exchanges more than objects in stories. For her the character of an object, it’s one in a million uniqueness could only be realised in such an exchange.

Car-booting and jumbles became a way of life and after a while she had come to welcome its unexpected detours and fluctuations. Aside from the everyday (and there was plenty of everyday from LeCreuset to Gaggia), unexpected charms and oddities turned her into a prolific collector. The collections never grew big, but did multiply reaching near the hundreds. Whether it was antique toys or African jewellery 16 years of religious attendance gave her time to be selective. She looked at her new curiosity. “You can buy things from different cultures without going there. In Russia it was not possible. It’s modern globe trotting!” “But would you not be more interested in going there?” “Oh of course! But in no life you can do all countries you want to see and go where you want to go but through this you touch the culture. You are lucky you have a collective culture here in London. Everything from all around the world is in abundance.” “That part’s true, but I’d still rather pick my way through a market in Delhi or Mumbai’s silver quarter to find that kundan bracelet you bought last month. The dry heat, the intense chatter of a thousand bartering voices and the fact that I will never know if I got the best price. It’s like no matter how many Indian restaurants I try nowhere does the food taste like in actual India. My friend tells me she prefers London Vietnamese food to the food in Vietnam! I disagree but still.” She’d only missed a handful of car boots over the past ten years. On New Year’s Day 2007 a hangover she labelled as a migraine did not agree with the 6 am start. A few stolen moments of her daughter’s time in London occasionally got in the way. Though she always tried to get back in time for WestPoint, spending her time trawling through someone else’s past instead of interrupting her daughter’s present. She glanced behind the Russian’s well-fitted suit and saw a small framed elderly man give her a soft welcoming smile from his stall. “Lets have a look at those books.” “That’s a religious stall Mama. He’ll tell you about the wisdom of the Qur’an. No gardening books there!” She turned away guiltily. “See if I owned a Qur’an I’d want a really old one”, she said quietly. “To sit with the sixteenth-century bible.” “I think his were made in China about five years ago.”

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

• The train home was pretty packed but she barely noticed. While gazing at the accidental arrangement of the G&T from Marks & Spencer and her new friend on the sticky train table she fleeted around her memories of the 1970s. India’s heat and colour and how the men at the Ashok looked on at her taut tanned body as it entered into the pool. She was as exotic now as she was then, though a new translation made her long for the days of flowers from strangers. She loved to travel, back in the Soviet days when she was on the books and glamour was ironically excessive. She liked to be looked at. It was part of her nature. Or maybe it was mimetic of her surrounding culture of looking at others. Scrutinising with a skeptical eye, enjoying being observer and observed. The early days in England were like a holiday, not because it was easy or relaxing but because she looked and sounded like a tourist. Her time as Head of Languages meant that she’d visited Britain many times before moving there ever became an option. Yet once the motherland faded in the distance everything became defined by her difference, her Russianness, to the point that even her friends were only ever Russia enthusiasts. Her husband, loving as he was, took on the appointment of chief enthusiast. Perhaps to prove he didn’t want some mail order bride. Or perhaps he really did like Russia. As he greeted her off the train she clasped her new friend in her hand. “Hello”, they kissed. “As always over so quickly.” She went into the study as soon as she got in. Often she’d use her Miller’s Guide but knew that her new companion would not sit within its index. A friend of hers, ex-art teacher from a private school, collected exquisite artefacts from distant soils and put her in touch with a small dealer in London. “We have one group of artists from Rapanui called Artesania Turi. They specialise in Fruteras and Figuras Ancestrales, your figurine sounds like the latter because of its symbolic nature. Our artisans are quite exclusive so I’d like to see a photograph before I can confirm anything. As you can imagine there are a lot of replicas, some that have never even touched the hands of an Easter Islander. We provide certificates for every purchase.” “OK well I will email. Thank you.” She mumbled to herself as she hung up the phone “touched the hands”. She thought of the sweet scent of chai and pigment on lingering fingers at Chhath Puja.

Ethnofictions

Dorset Studio ceramics and Fortnum and Mason Earl Grey. Mexico next to Ukraine. Her friends in Russia saw her life as she painted it and as time had passed perhaps it somehow was. She placed it in between the Raku blob and Celtic candle stick, their rugged tactility somehow complemented each other. • Months passed and it sat undisturbed. She acquainted herself with an array of new places, people and stories. With the passing of time came new sets of complications. Her delicately crafted life not quite confirmed by the experts, a replica whose value is no longer translating now needs a new audience. The daughter felt mixed, not one or the other, happy and sad. Holding the phone she listened to what felt like the next chapter of a book she had already read. “It’s good, we’ve made the decision and that’s how we need to do this.” “OK. So when?” “We need to sell the house of course and a lot of things. Get things ready and we’ll go. Promise me you won’t buy any furniture or anything for your new place? You can take anything of ours you need.” Her voice was quivering. “OK.” “I’m going to learn Greek in preparation and we’re going over to look at a village near Nisaki again. You know it’s paradise there. It really is. I always loved Gerald Durrel and I see it now. You should read it.” “That’s brilliant. I’m happy I promise. I’m glad you’ve realised that things need to change. It sounds great.” “We’ll shift a lot of stuff through auctions and the rest through car-boots and eBay. I only want to take the really good stuff. It’s like we’ve been building up to this. I think we are taking mainly English and Russian things. You know. We have a lot you can have. You can have all my bags, scarves, anything.” It was going to take time to clear the house and they needed to decide whether they wanted to send a big or small container. She had come with just a suitcase.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

The Incurable Truth Adam Elias

As I sit with two friends in the local pub on the final day of the football season, we mull over the progress (or lack thereof) of our team over the past year. Looking around I notice a change; “a lot of people drinking coffee in this pub” I chuckle. Weird. But we just laugh some more about how supporters of other teams behave and dismiss the feeling that my silly observation was hiding something – a sense that we were now ready to accept further changes that have come about in football. I hear a particularly loud group at the next table cheer as a Manchester United fan proudly draws back his sleeve revealing a tattoo on his forearm of his team’s latest acquisition: Michael Carrick. “Those bastards stole him from us” snorted Sukhdev. “You’re still going on about this?”, pressed Aman, “you know that he only left because the Chairman refused to meet his wage demands... and relative to the wages of other top players, a raise would have been deserved”. We discuss further those players who have been linked to Tottenham, according to SkySports and hear fractured snippets of conversation from tables nearby:

that another story of dishonesty and underhand dealings may distort one’s memory of the past season. I am talking of course about the growing unethical practices in football; the unethical practices of owners, chairmen, managers, coaches, scouts and even players themselves for financial gain, managerial kudos and legacy. As I begin to tell the guys my version of events, I can’t help but fear that my retelling of the story may be as inauthentic as those told by journalists who chase stories, spin them and pass them on. I also know that when you retell the story it’s going to change again. But I’ll give it a go anyway.... Chelsea Football Club is owned by Roman Abramovich, an Eastern European oil magnate, whose questionable never-ending pot of wealth has propelled the team that he purchased four years ago (for half of what it is now worth) to the top of the league, making them one of the world’s most profitable teams. Hull City Football Club, on the other hand, is owned by Paul Duffen, a former sales and marketing director for a distribution company, who has stabilised the clubs finances and overseen the growth of an academy to develop the skills of young players signed at 14 to the Youth Training Scheme.

“The title was the closest it’s been for a few years.”

We guess that they’re referring to Ronaldo’s tendency to twist the rules of the game. It’s now illegal within a match to ‘simulate’ a foul, but he’s certainly got a talent for acting! Whether or not he is breaking the rules or merely acting dishonestly within them is a conversation for another day. I fear, however,

At 17, Nassor Djourou, had worked his way through the ranks at Hull City and promised to be one of the Ivory Coast’s brightest young stars. It came as no surprise that, when a small club like Hull produced a precocious talent, many larger clubs from around Europe showed interest in securing a professional contract with them. The fear that was visible in the eyes of the supporters and that was felt all over Hull, expressed concern that it may ultimately be the smaller club that would suffer. Chelsea could have waited to make a bid for Djourou in the transfer window, which opened on 10 January, however, various press outlets suggested that a senior figure at Chelsea had been caught ‘tapping-up’ the young player in an attempt to secure a deal in a quasi-

“Did you see the Munich game?! Best game all season!” “You only won because Ronaldo dived to win the penalty.” “I wouldn’t wanna win that way!”

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

illegal transaction, by offering a large undisclosed fee to the player and his father. The Daily Express reported that: A dark haired man, wearing an expensive suit (rumoured to be affiliated with Chelsea) has been spotted dining with Nassor Djourou and his father in a market café in South East London; not an inconspicuous place for a man of such calibre to be carrying out his business, one might think. The legitimacy of the source is questionable as whispers had passed from stall to stall in the market as people gossiped, exaggerated and diluted fact with fiction leaving us with the residue of a story that one elderly gentleman regaled to the media, presumably for a handsome sum. Stallholders all needed a bit of extra cash during the economic downturn, especially since a new supermarket had opened only one mile away. We cannot be certain whether what follows is a real account of what happened that day, however we can be sure that an affiliate of a Premiership club met with a young African player and his father in a market café . This crumbling, family-run café is a long way from the board room and the kind of extravagances that somebody affiliated to a Premiership club might be used to. Even if everything was above board, it reeked of scandal and perhaps all parties should have been wiser with their choice of clandestine venue.

Ethnofictions

went further to explain in broken English to the well groomed gentleman sat across the intimate café table, staring shrewdly through him with piercing blue eyes that, “we have more meetings this week and give you answer on Monday”. The businessman shifted in his seat. Perhaps he was not used to being kept waiting or perhaps he was uncomfortable, acknowledging the disparity between the stability of his role within the footballing community and such hidden meetings that his reputation masked. However, he firmly retorted to the young man’s greedy father, “I hope you appreciate the position that I am in here. I am putting my neck on the line to help your son and am operating outside the rules. I realise that you may be looking out for the best interests of your boy, however if he signed to my club, we would take care of everything.” Leaning in further, and now in low, but severe tones he asserted through a strongly clenched jaw, “you are aware that I am willing to offer you both a ‘buffer’... a little good faith money...”. The rest of the conversation had not been heard, or was perhaps lost on its journey to this version of events. However, what we can be sure of is that things were being put into motion outside of what is deemed legal activity... we all know it happens and we all keep quiet, without acknowledging our part in funding such activity.

“HOW MUCH?!” belted an eager Djourou, after receiving confirmation from the suited man with a broad eastern European accent, “that’s more than Lampard is paid!”.

At 14, Djourou moved from the Ivory Coast to Hull and signed at four year contract, which committed him to the then Division One team, unless an offer was made within the appropriate time frame, through the appropriate channels set by the Football Association.

“Now, now son. We can’t confirm anything, despite the very generous offer,” Djourou’s father made clear to his son, and

Chelsea knew that if they made a legal bid for Djourou, Hull would reject it as they would obviously be keen to keep a hold of one of the

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Premiership’s most promising talents; a talent that could help ensure the team’s league survival, needed to secure the necessary funds to bolster the squad for the following season. Chelsea’s interest in Djourou had been made apparent in the press since pre-season, with outrageous transfer fees projected and rumours about the gargantuan wage packet that was allegedly being put together to tempt the young playmaker away from the team that brought him to England. Media saturation surrounding Djourou continued through the season and it was, at one point, suggested that he would be receiving a sponsorship deal alongside his basic wage (which would dwarf anything that Hull could even dream about offering), extra luxuries and an opulent lifestyle that promised fame as well as fortune. It appeared that Djourou would benefit greatly from such a move, as alongside the lavish lifestyle that would accompany the switch, he would gain the opportunity to test his ability at the highest level of the game.

Ethnofictions

and the promises of fame, fortune and adulation that are often dangled in front of a player’s nose. It was a brave decision to make as a player in today’s game. In recent years, ethics have lost their way in football and clubs are now multi-million publicly limited companies, wielding an awful lot of power and imposing a commanding presence upon global financial markets. It is therefore a refreshing surprise for a young man to privilege loyalty over potential earnings or success. Djourou appeared to understand the importance of devotion to a club, the fans and the game, rather than potential earnings, sponsorship or fame. As the season drew to an end, Hull were suffering and despite some very mature performances from Djourou, they were facing relegation. Chelsea’s season on the other hand, had gained momentum and they were in second place in the league with one game remaining. Some people called it a twist of fate, and others have nodded towards karmic circles within the game, however, it is most probably just a coincidence that Chelsea’s final opponents for the season were Hull.

Bartering is always a gamble and whilst one party may be left regretting a decision that allowed themselves to become merely a commodity, the other may be left reaping the benefits of the tradeoff. Gossip in the media was turning Djourou into a commodity, being bartered for in a speculative tournament, where his market price became totally divorced from his value as a skilled footballer. Further reports resulted in a larger disparity between price and value, rendering his abilities as a player of little or no concern.

The stakes were high; if Chelsea were to win, they could capture the league title, yet if Hull managed to secure the win, they would survive relegation and be able to mount another challenge in the following season.

Hull City’s official website announced that Djourou had pledged his future to the Hull until the end of the season. Djourou may have not been aware of the message that he was sending to the footballing community by snubbing the advances of a larger club

This game become about more than relegation and survival or triumph and glory. As the match day approached, whispered conversations could be heard around the grounds, in cafés, markets, pubs and offices. The media picked up on these whisperings and a few cleverly-worded headlines and shrewdly placed articles meant that the game became

If Hull were to lose they would face relegation, miss out on the financial rewards that the top league promises and face the prospect of a mass exodus of players and staff.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

about something more than football. Pundits could not be found discussing team tactics, player fitness or managerial style, but were to be heard talking about markets, transfer fees, wages, ethics, tapping-up, scandal and ultimately searching for a solution to the incurable truth of the football transfer market. It all suddenly became so simplistic and the future of ethics within football rested weightily upon Nassor Djourou’s young shoulders. He had been fetishised by the clubs, the press and worst of all the fans who bought into the speculation, merely by giving it their time and in turn giving it value. The gifted playmaker had become the poster boy for the social relations within the transfer market and all the broken dreams, debt and deceit that lie behind it.

Ethnofictions

Aman quickly dismisses Sukhdev’s wild fantasies about corruption in football as just that. Perhaps it is the players who are the victims or perhaps it may be the smaller clubs like Hull that suffer most, having to abandon their dreams and sell their best players to survive. This is the incurable truth of a game that has become all about the power of money.

If Hull were able to do the seemingly impossible and defeat Chelsea, then Djourou’s loyalty to his club would prove that the ethical decision of one man and the game run deeper than the pockets of wealthy corporations who manage football clubs like businesses. I asked my friends whether or not they thought that Djourou and Hull winning would have made any difference. Aman suggested that if they’d won it might have signalled to the big clubs, so keen on poaching talent from the under-class of the football league, that the game needn’t be controlled by finances and trade. Perhaps there would be a way to cap the extraordinary wages commanded by young players who become slaves to rich and powerful clubs. It felt like we were trying to find a solution and we conceded that it may not have been important who won, as football has long passed this pivotal point. “Haha, you missed out so many vital details from that story...” laughed Sukhdev. He continued: “You’ve oversimplified the whole thing. The discussion is bigger than you’re making it. There are loads of young African players farmed into English football with fake passports... who knows how old Djourou really is!” 44

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

The Internal Life Lena Theodoropoulou

1 April A week ago I moved into a small apartment on O’ Meara Street. It is lovely; bright and cozy. It is on the second floor of an old building and the best part is the Saturday street market just outside my door! There are people selling whatever anyone could imagine; from useful to completely useless stuff: furniture, old books, batteries, mobile phones and also food from all over the world, including fruit and vegetables. It is always so busy on Saturdays, especially when the weather is good. People of all ages and nationalities walk up and down the market, eating, chatting and commenting on the things they see. At my doorstep there is an old guy selling items that someone might find in the garbage or in general get for free. He is tall, very thin, with long white hair and is usually wearing a magician’s hat. He doesn’t look very healthy though…. He has lost most of his teeth and is arching all the time. I think he is British. He doesn’t even have a stall; he just spreads all the objects on the street and stands on the corner, waiting for the people passing by to show interest. I really like the idea of people making their living out of items that someone else would have never thought to sell. Next to him there is another guy selling old furniture. He is more normal or at least more formal. He actually has a proper shop, but every Saturday he takes some furniture out on the street, in front of the shop. On the other side of the street there is a stall selling organic coffee. Well, it is a bit expensive but it deserves every last penny! It is a boy and girl at about my age that own this stall. They are both French. These are my new, Saturday neighbours. They seem to be very familiar with each other; like a small community that has guests every Saturday – I mean the visitors of the market. I would love to become a part of this community…. Alice was really enjoying her new apartment. One month later she had already started feeling like home. Every Saturday she would buy coffee from the stall downstairs and then go back home to watch the street from her window. It was like sneaking into other people’s lives, as no one knew she was there. Later in the day, she would take a walk down the street, meet her friends and do some shopping. 29 April By now, I have learnt so many things about the way the market works. First of all there is a controller. His name is Steve. He is thin, tall and about 40 years old. Every Saturday he walks up and down the market. Often he stops in front of some stalls, keeping notes. His face 46

London street market, 2009

is a bit strict but he always talks with many people, making jokes and laughing. His job is to make sure that there are no illegal activities taking place in the market. However, the guy at my doorstep, Tom, is illegal; but Steve doesn’t seem bothered at all. Tom has been working in the market for 20 years and has gained everyone’s respect; at the same time he has gained the right to occupy this place on the street without paying anything to the municipality. His son also works with him – actually it seems like they are the same age, probably because they are both alcoholics – so it is like a family business. It is so sweet that the controller doesn’t kick them out of the market – just because they have been there before he had! It seems that this small street has its own rules! The Saturday after was the first time that Alice felt like buying something from Tom. It was a small music box that drew her attention; dark red outside, a bit dirty and, of course, very old. When opening it there was a song coming out that could hardly be heard. Inside, the surface of the box was covered with black velvet. However, by the time Alice was ready to ask for the price, she heard Tom’s voice informing her that this item was not for sale. He took it from her hands and hid it behind some old discs. Then he smiled gently and offered her an old, dirty statue made of wood, for only five pounds. Alice was not 47

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

interested in this object. “Who on earth would buy such a thing and for what reason?” she wondered. At that point she noticed a short, red haired lady next to her. She was accompanied by a young girl, who could be her daughter. “I will buy it” the woman said, in a slight Russian accent, while searching for her wallet. Alice stepped back to make some space for this woman with the annoying loud voice, to buy this useless item. 2 June It is amazing how many things I see happening when observing the market from my window! Last Saturday there were four people fighting. One of them was holding a blue plastic bag, but I couldn’t see what was inside. Another man was trying to get the bag, claiming he was a police officer, showing the others an ambivalent badge that couldn’t really confirm his identity. He was accusing them of having stolen the items inside the bag and he wanted to confiscate it. The other three were denying everything, saying that the objects belong to them and that the fake policeman just wanted to steal them. A bit later the three men decided to keep walking and give an end to this fight. The other man followed them and a few minutes later I saw him coming back, holding the bag. Maybe he was a policeman after all…. I find these small fights extremely intriguing. I wish I knew everything behind them, who is right and who is wrong. I also love the market’s myths. For example, people say that Daniel, the guy selling bikes just around the corner, is actually selling drugs and guns and uses the bikes only as a cover. According to another myth, the market café is a pitch for illegal transactions, connected to football; deals for non-official transcriptions, or something like that. I don’t really believe all these rumours. They sound like stories that people like to tell in order to make their lives spicier. I live on the market and the whole street is visible from my window. I would have noticed all these mysterious activities if they really existed. Actually, the only mystery for me is the identity of a tall man in a suit, who every Saturday walks up and down the market. He doesn’t talk to anyone and no one talks to him. Maybe I should start chatting more with the people that work in the market, in order to solve this mystery. The following Saturday, Alice decided to gather more information about the market. She started by trying to approach Tom. She bought her usual coffee and 48

Stall at a London street market, 2009

started observing the objects that Tom was selling. Alice was asking questions about the market, about the people that were walking up and down and about the items that he was selling. Tom was in a good mood but still, not very talkative. Then Alice expressed her curiosity about the way Tom found the objects he was selling. “I just find them, wherever” was Tom’s short reply. After this small talk Alice went back home. That Saturday she didn’t feel like observing the market from her window. Instead, she closed the curtains and watched a movie. Later that day, she wrote in her diary: There was something weird in Tom’s voice today. Although he was neither rude, nor aggressive, it was his tone that made me feel uncomfortable. As if he was trying to separate his world from mine. But I don’t see why he would feel the need to do something like that. It is quite obvious – to me at least – that I am not ignorant. I know that many of the items sold in the market are stolen, or not supposed to be exchanged for money; but I also know that there is a huge distance between selling stolen items of small value and trading guns and drugs, or doing illegal football deals. But at the same time I could never ask Tom directly about these extreme rumours. Why do I hesitate to ask simple questions? Maybe I don’t trust my eyes enough…. Maybe deep inside I believe that there is more happening than the things I see. 22 June Today there were two policemen walking up and down the market. At some point they started talking with the controller. He showed them a man behind a stall. I had noticed him before; he had only been in the market for two weeks. The policemen approached him and 49

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

arrested him, without making a big deal. The man seemed surprised at the beginning but he didn’t resist at all. I still enjoy it when there is something non-ordinary happening in the market. However today’s incident was quite sad. Maybe the man that got arrested was an illegal immigrant, or maybe he was involved in illegal trading, but who isn’t in this market anyway? It seems that there is a market law, in coexistence with common law. Or maybe the market law, or lack of law, has certain limits. My discussion with Tom last Saturday was a bit of a failure. I should start talking with more people. Otherwise I will never get to know more things about how the market really works. Next Saturday Alice woke up quite late. She took a quick glimpse out of her window. The market was extremely busy. She got dressed and went out, but instead of buying her coffee as usually, she went to talk to Daniel. He was fixing an old bike at that point. “Good morning. I am interested in buying a bike.” She received no reply. “Excuse me, could you please tell me how much this bike costs?” She was pointing on an old fashioned blue bike. Daniel’s reply was “the prices are written on the bikes”, without even looking at her. Alice was really upset. It was pointless. There was no way she could have a proper conversation with Daniel. She considered his behaviour to be quite weird. “Maybe he is involved in some illegal activities after all”, she thought. Alice went to buy her usual coffee. When passing in front of Tom, her eye fell again on that music box she had seen. “Sorry sweetheart; still not for sale.” It was Tom’s voice. She smiled at him and he smiled back. When going back upstairs Alice noticed the man in the suit passing by. She would never dare talk to him. After she had left, Daniel went to say something to Tom. They both laughed quite loud.

Ethnofictions

any of their personal experiences about the market, as she had hoped at the beginning, when moving in this flat. When Alice finished her usual walk, had done all her shopping and was about to go back to her apartment, she heard Tom’s voice calling her: “Hey you! Come back here.” She went close to him. “Do you still want to buy that music box? It costs five quid.” Alice was almost moved by this gesture. She replied positively, gave Tom the five pounds and thanked him about three times. What she didn’t see, is that after she left, the man in the suit appeared and approached Tom aggressively. But Tom calmed him down by showing him Alice’s window and the entrance of the building. The next day, someone broke in Alice’s apartment while she was away. They took her laptop, some jewels and the music box that she had just bought. 20 July I have started looking for a new apartment. I am sure by now that I want to move out. First of all it is really weird to live in a place where I know that someone got in during my absence. At the same time I don’t feel very comfortable in this area. I have the impression that since the day I was robbed, the people from the market have started acting in a mysterious way. Why on earth would a thief care so much about a music box? I can’t tell if there are any secrets or not, but if there are, I don’t want to know anything about them. I don’t really care; I don’t belong here anyway! I just want to leave….

The Saturday after, Alice decided to make one more effort to approach the people of the market. She said good morning to everyone: to Tom and his son, to Daniel and the couple selling coffee (she never got to learn their names). They were all friendlier than the previous Saturday, smiling to her, but without sharing

One week later, Alice was already moving out. Although it was Saturday when she was leaving her flat, she didn’t bother saying goodbye to anyone at the market. Tom and Daniel sat on the pavement, watching her carrying her luggage. “I can’t believe that girl is moving out in such a hurry and without even saying goodbye” said Tom. “Oh yes. I’ve seen her before. She has been living here for some time. Right?” Daniel replied. “Right. I wonder why she is moving out so suddenly.” Daniel made a face of ignorance. “Who knows? Maybe she has her personal reasons….”

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Ethnofictions

(Ex)changing the Quotidian Marimar Suarez

22 September, 9:11

Fasal sees his watch and realises that he is late, but that doesn’t stop him from buying his weekly fig barfis. He goes into Madhurbon Store, just next to Karir and Sons Clothes. Chhaya is there, as always, waiting for her first customer. Her orange sari contrasts against the pink karappusas, green gavvalu and white vadals. Fasal regrets that he can’t smell the nice pistachio that he so much enjoys as a strong smell of kebab speeds through the place. “How is it going, Chhaya? How was your week?” “Well you know, we haven’t been selling a lot these days. My father says it’s the crisis but I am just bored. Did you a have a busy week at the Hospital?” “It was more exciting in the beginning, now it’s a bit of a routine and until I get the GP diploma they don’t really let me work. But today I’m really excited, we just got new material from the Dawah Centre. We even got an explanation on the meaning of Christ in many languages and a booklet about the position of women in Islam… you should read it by the way because you keep doubting us.” “Oh come on Fasal, I have told you thousands times that I respect you but I’m not really interested in religion. How many barfis do you want today?” “Five please, £3.50 right?” As he walks towards his stall he sees Daniel installing his bikes, around 30 of them. He has a quick look at the prices; 45, 60, 65, 75, 125, and 145. Each Saturday he wonders how come this guy sells these stolen bikes for such amounts. He passes by Ramon and Susan, who are opening their stuffed suitcases, and says “hi” to Mai, who has already displayed all her jewellery, lamps and all kinds of small cases. “Of course”, he thinks, “I’m late”. Fasal has known this place for 20 years. For him, coming from Bangladesh, the market is where he sees a sign of the freedom that characterises London. He 52

London street market, 2009

could go to Speakers Corner but his fascination with the market is that “people are not just passing by, they all come looking for something… who knows, that might be God”, he writes in his diaries. “Today, I saw more than ever the process of gentrification that Steve talks so much about. These young and very peculiar Japanese girls came for the first time to spread out their sheet on the floor, just next to Tom and Son’s. The contrast between the fashionable Asian objects and the Charles Dickens’ audiobooks was amazing. More and more I see rich white people around the area, I still remember those days when only immigrants were coming to the market. For us, the chance to talk to people remains open and God keeps asking us to go there and bring his message closer to everyone,” the diary continued. While opening his table to display the new Islamic booklets he glances over to check if the Moroccan bracelet is still on Mai’s sheet. Last Saturday he wanted to buy it but didn’t have enough money. Mai warned him that anything could happen during the week as she planned to sell at a Tuesday market and a couple of car boots. As soon as Fasal sees the bracelet he feels relieved. He knows that, because Mai won’t sell anything before noon, he can focus on his stall and haggle with her later. 53

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11:43

Ethnofictions

London street market, 2009

It’s a busy day for Steve. It is getting harder each Saturday as the new traders have started recognising him. He walks slowly and discretely from O’ Meara Street to Chester Road but as soon as he approaches the market he sees the DVD sellers he’s named the ‘Asian Pirates’ running. On the next corner an Asian woman stands with her four year old son. One of the pirates runs towards them and hides a bunch of 20-pound notes in the child’s blouse pocket while the mother checks that Steve is not watching. When the deed is done the three of them walk calmly, as if they were just visiting the market. Steve saw everything, he always does. After 25 years of doing this job he rarely misses information. He has even taken pictures of them running away but he can’t be bothered with trying to charge the family. He knows that there is no way to prove that the money in the child’s pocket was illegally obtained. “How is it going, Khar? Where is Fasal?” “He just went to bring us some food. They ran away again, uh?” “Well, you know how it is. The more illegal you are, the less I can prove it. Thank God you guys don’t sell anything. Otherwise we couldn’t be friends. This market is not how it used to be. More and more big mafias have infiltrated.” “I know. They are very far from the love of God.” “I told you about your friend with the bikes there, right?” “Who? Daniel? Yeah sure, and I have told you how paranoiac you have become. That guy is nice, he is just working.” “No, no, no Khar! Don’t say later I didn’t warn you. That guy is trouble and hopefully soon we will catch him. He is very dangerous, related to drug and gun dealers. Those bikes are just a facade. See how he is looking at me.” “Well then I don’t really understand why you and the police don’t do something about it.” “Khar, so many years coming here but you haven’t learned a thing. These things 54

Seller at a London street market, 2009

are very hard to prove, my job is just to prevent it from getting worst.” Steve stares at the Muslim booklets on the table. “The Qur’an and Modern Science, this is new! I’ll read it and we’ll talk about it next week.” His job was once a passion. Steve used to be convinced that one day he and his colleagues would succeed on professionalising the market. “This place has to be cleaned and normalised. Traders must pay their fees and order and control must govern the area,” this always used to be his reply when people told him his efforts were useless. “I am a city guardian and we need to follow the rules to function as a society.” His main frustration was his friends’ lack of understanding that, without controllers, mafias would take over the streets and they would all be scared in their own neighbourhood. He had been repeating this speech for many years, until his hopes started to fade. Going there every Saturday and getting to know the traders had made his job near impossible. Recently, he even caught himself thinking that they have the right to be there. “Where else?”, he wondered, “people have to live out of something”. 55

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Ethnofictions

“I have five pounds but my wife will love it…. I can pay you the rest next week?” “Ugh Fasal, give me seven quid and it’s yours.” “Deal! Thanks Mai, I really like it and trust you it’s from Morocco.” What Mai loves about her job is the unexpectedness of both the objects and buyers. She likes finding these pieces, each with their unique history, and moving them from one market to another; from one owner to another. It offers her the possibility to give them a new life, to intervene with their destiny. She thinks of herself as a traditional trader whose function is to make things travel. Mai enjoys going to Tesco or Primark to observe the stability and fakeness of everything. “These things don’t travel, poor them they are not free”, she thinks. Then at night she goes straight to the large world map hanging in her living room to proudly trace lines between the countries in which she intervened that week. 16:12

Steve enters the market café. Next to him he sees the guy with the suit. He has been here before, always talking on the phone with a broad Eastern European accent. There is something about him that Steve doesn’t like. It could be his piercing blue eyes that unnerved him. By now, he is so bored that he starts fantasising about the probability of this sir being a real criminal that he could catch.

London street market, 2009

13:37

“So Mai, are you gonna give me that beautiful bracelet for my wife?” “I have told you it’s ten pounds.” “Mai this is the most expensive thing you have ever had. Where did you get it from? Is it really Moroccan?” “Ah Fasal, you know how it is when you are in the markets business. You just cross by things, get them from friends, exchange them… this bracelet, I found it but it is authentically Moroccan.” 56

“Cafe latté please.” “No eating today?” “No. I’ll finish soon and rather go back home.” He sits at a table by the window from which he can still see what’s going on in his market. Tom is, as always, making jokes. Now he is talking to two blond tourists. There is something about Tom and the people he talks to that Steve feels uncomfortable about. Something decadent, but that is not a reason to 57

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

report him. It is his stubbornness against upgrading his stall 20 cm from the floor that really bothers Steve. “It’s tricky with these people. The fact that they have been in the market for so long shouldn’t exclude them from regeneration but there is something about them having earned the space that I can’t be blind to,” Steve thinks while filling in the market’s control sheet. Years patrolling the streets had helped him come up with a simple system to mark where people were and where they were going. Trader, regeneration and illegal. He writes a ‘T’ next to Tom’s name, knowing that it should really be an ‘I’. When he puts the ‘R’ next to Mai’s name he feels so proud. He knows it’s not happened yet but next week for sure, as agreed, she will have her 20 cm stall. “One day she will be a professional trader”, he thinks, “she has potential”. 26 November, 22:27, Fasal’s diary

“This, I never saw it happening. I am sad, confused, mixed feelings. Last Saturday Steve didn’t come to the market. The rumour was that he had lost his job due to changes of the authorities in the Council. Mai told me that she was scared because the new Council Leader was planning a ‘war against illegality’. Steve mentioned it as well but he was confident that as soon as he and the other controllers managed to explain him how things were, the leader was going to go for the politics of tolerance that had been governing previously. Today, I came earlier in the morning because I had promised to put up our stall. As I started walking from Cockspur Street towards Malet Street I had a very strange feeling. Things were not as usual. Emptiness, silence and awkwardness had invaded the place. Suddenly two, three, four, I don’t really know how many, big police cars (not the ones I am used to but more aggressive ones) passed through. Then I lost them. Later on, Mai, Tom, Susan and Daniel started arriving and laying out their stalls; suddenly everything seemed normal again. As I write it I still can’t believe it happened. It was 12:37, I will always remember the time, and policemen started appearing from everywhere jumping down from the 58

Ethnofictions

roofs, coming out from every single street and corner. It was as if everyone has been prepared for this moment for years and yet not ready to react as fast as it was needed.” Suddenly his pen pauses on the diary as he goes over the scenes from that morning. Daniel running and those three policemen immediately catching him. Mai not even trying to run, just let herself go with the police. Tom kept yelling “I’ve been here for 20 years! I do no harm, we just come here to spend the day mate!”, as he was conducted towards the big cars on the other side of O’Meara Street. The Asian Pirates were all caught as well. Fasal realises that no one escaped from his block. They are all being prosecuted for not having a license to sell in the market. Confused, Fasal is unable to put into words his feeling that they all belong to that market and wonders what the authorities will do to all these people. He glues a picture of him and Tom, taken 15 years ago, next to a cut out from the afternoon newspaper: “After the operation in the market authorities declared that ‘this is the first of many strategies to clean the city from traders who are turning pavements into slums and not treating the city with respect. Our work is to govern legitimate citizens and to impede that poor educated migrants continue the physical and social destruction of the city.’ The recently elected Council Leader said: ‘We will review the legal status of all the arrested people and those under regular conditions will be free. From now on the law will govern and we will not tolerate illegality.’” Some of the quotes on this last paragraph were taken from Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos Documenta 11, Platform 4, Okwui Enwezor (ed.); and from Planet of Slums, by Mike Davis.

The Value of Things

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

Introduction

Two pound, two pound! – Anonymous Seller, Holloway Car Boot Sale

... a universal hawker cries to pique the interest of potential consumers. Are commodity and currency the only things that are exchanged in markets, or is there a personal investment as well? Certainly, in our age of hyper-consumption and globalisation, where you shop is as relevant as what you buy. What leads people to the uncertain sites of car boot sales and informal markets, with no map to guide them? Desire. Just as consumers desire to buy, there are also those who desire to sell. Many markets have arisen from the needs of diasporic communities, Chinatown and Brick Lane being just two examples, (however, these two markets are now no longer exclusive to their founding cultural communities). Whereas others – car boot sales and other such ‘informal’ markets – have also emerged relationally alongside the ‘formal’ economy. Equally there are those that have come into being, simply because of the site’s historical value – a history for history’s sake.

Car boot sales and informal markets are depicted in the first piece as crossroads of an open system, sites where the intertwinement of variegated stalls, assorted objects and dislocated voices produce new relationalities and new meanings. ‘Fragments: Voices, Objects, Flows and Paths from an Eluding Economy’ describes how people, that participate in these geopolyphonic enactments, in order to survive and transcend inequalities, produce alternative exchange forms, eluding norms and definitions. Focusing primarily on Shepherd’s Bush Market, ‘Because of its History’ uses the marketplace as a trading ground through which to the track the values of those that uphold and maintain the market in light of the Westfield redevelopment. This initial interest leads to an exploration of the affects of migration and the shifting sense of ‘community’. ‘Chinatown’ explores the anomaly that is Chinatown in urban cities – a culturally concentrated space of diaspora and migration that is physically enclosed yet accessible. Though it harkens back to a homeland that is not where it is situated, it has nonetheless become embedded in the cities that host it. It is a multitude of similar spaces in other places. ‘What would you Sacrifice?’ is a personal narrative concerned with the process of the valuation of objects in a market on the fringes of the dominant economy: a car boot sale in London. Reflective of the process that embeds monetary value (on a grand scale) in the objects that travel around systems of exchange today, this story is one that unravels the individual investment that serves as a platform for value – and the much larger economy in general – to be realised. Taking Holloway car boot sale as a site of observation, ‘Car “Booty” – Performing Value in the Marketplace’ focuses on the myriad of economies that emerge in the market. Working within the tradition of fieldwork practice, annotated ‘data’ reveals how the market is a site for performing value and for association formation. It comprises ‘characters’ that inform the economies and regulations to be found there and whose activities are symptomatic of broader narratives within the ‘marketplace’. As these five narratives weave together, markets evolve as contested sites in and of themselves, where informality and fragmentation is rife, where the definition ‘value’ is always indeterminate and where commodities are always objects with a ‘story’ to tell. They reveal themselves as nodes within a much broader network of economies, commodities, communities and migrational tactics, whose constituent parts are symptomatic of, rather than an ‘aside’ to, these networks.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Migration

• Rules imposed by a governing body/authority to avoid informal (and illegal) activities occurring in markets. • Where overarching regulation breaks down, or is non-existent, self-regulation emerges. • The latter also emerges in resistance to the regulations set by an ‘authority’. • Regulation, or lack thereof, encourages ruptures, gaps and new zones of contact to proliferate.

• The mass movement of peoples from one place to another. • The movement of a particular group (linked by language or culture) from one place to another.

The value of an object depends on: • Its histories and geographies. • Its capacity of answering a specific desire, at a determinate moment and place. • Its capacity of making people dream, imagine, remember. • Its relation with the objects that are sold next to it.

Stability/Instability Informality/Formality

• Instruction and regulation versus a lack of instruction and regulation. • Casual behaviour versus an appropriate mode of behaviour. • Intimate versus aloofness.

Fieldwork

• The collection of data relative to the field of the social sciences. • The practice of site-specific observation to learn about specific groups of people, their environment and social structures. • Fieldwork is a determined practice not an objective one. • The ‘observer’ is a participant who makes subjective decisions about to collect and what to ‘leave behind’.

Value

Lexicon Regulation

The value of Things

In terms of economic practices, stability/instability denotes a constant fluctuation that mirrors the ever-changing production of value. It is observable in all facets of the market from pricing (i.e. in terms of commodities, niche market value [real-estate, stock, intellectual property, etc.], exchange rate, and so on) to the changes that take place in the market system itself (from the dominant economy to markets existing on its fringes).

Community

A means of collectivity. An avenue through which to exercise a sense of belonging. Physically it is an infrastructure of bodies that share social norms and values within microculture. A sharing of minds, formation of status quo, the autonomy to be a part of a social whole whilst exercising the freedom to be an individual.

Commodity

Something that is consumed, that has function and use. Something that is often ‘valued’, financially. Something in, and amongst, the chain of ‘supply and demand’. Its value is culturally and historically defined/varied/specific.

Economy

A social construct that involves the exchange of valuable objects. The process of valuation and subsequent creation of worth – which is neither entirely subjective nor objective, but both – is the result of economy in practice. It is an inescapable social force that changes with time to suit and reflect all other contemporaneous facets of a given society. Economy is a phenomenon produced in the gap between human collectivity and individual need and desire.

Survival

People survive: • Through informal markets. • Activating processes of mutual aid, cooperation and interdependency. • Producing networks across different countries • Overturning each obstacle, at the right moment, sliding and flowing around it, through a personal and creative way. • Disassembling, imagining, conceiving, playing and reassembling things with the tools that they have at their disposal.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Car ‘Booty’ – Performing Value in the Marketplace Blanche Craig

001 Setting the Stage for Fieldwork

I am waiting outside the gates, watching as the cars pull in and neatly arrange themselves in rows. The crowd behind me is growing, restless. Finally, ‘big Dave’ arrives, armed with keys. The crowd thickens as the gates open, and there is an assertive push from somewhere behind me; we all flow through the entrance and inside. It is approximately 10.30 am when I enter Holloway car boot sale. Some have been waiting here as early as 7.00 am. I am here both as a participant and observer; an ethnographer engaged in the practice of ‘fieldwork’. Working from the various fragments of the site I am compiling a narrative that seeks neither to communicate a ‘truth’ about the car boot sale, or to make overarching statements about ‘markets’ as a ‘whole’, but, rather, to identify characters and events that demonstrate how it might speak more broadly of the culture that has produced it.1 Car boot sales are an unconventional form of market to study, for their seemingly informal and unregulated nature. In such an environment, there appears to be very little regularity – stallholders continually change, the pricing of commodities is negotiable and the ‘architecture’ of the space is always temporal. However, this market comprises fragments of self-regulation too. Not only is it ‘managed’ by the event’s organisers, but it encompasses unformalised ‘rules’ and regulations, which are ‘set’ by the regulars that sell there. (These rules/regulations become manifest in the practice of regular stallholders ‘securing’ the same pitch every week, the ‘regulation’ of the pricing system and the infrastructure that emerges to support the ‘workers’ and the market’s organisers; two ‘cafés’ and an outdoor ‘sitting room’.) Through this commonality of regulation it shares with the ‘formal’ economy, Holloway car boot sale cannot simply be read as its ‘informal’ opposite. It is not situated ‘outside’ of the ‘formal’ economy but is relative to it. The multiple voices, activities and ruptures that occur in the car boot sale might appear to be specific to it but, in fact, are symptomatic of the ‘macro-scale’, and the events and incidents that take place there. There are so many ‘characters’ performing within the ‘micro-scale’ of the car boot sale – the watch seller, shoe seller, the furniture stall, the hardware stall, the ‘sitting room’, the stamp collecter, ‘Vicky the valuer’, the ‘contraband couple’ and “If I tell you I’ll have to kill you” – all vying for attention and inviting their narratives to be folded into this one. As an ‘ethnographer’ engaged in the practice of fieldwork, I must make a choice as to which should be heard. The following stories are just a few of the fragments I have collected.

The value of Things

002 “You can’t be looking, it’s only money.”

Vicky is a frequent visitor to Holloway car boot sale. She arrives every weekend and takes it upon herself to help vendors value their goods ‘correctly’. Usually, it turns out, they have missed a trick; overlooked an item of some value that only she is privy to. “Clean this up” she says, “and you could get 50 pounds for it”. And “that’s worth at least 15”. The origin – and legitimacy – of Vicky’s expertise is unclear. It seems only by the virtue of being a regular visitor – a native – to the car boot sale that she has such ‘authority’ in the practice of valuing goods. Vicky’s encounters with the car boot sale’s stallholders instigate a process of rupturing of the market’s economy each and every time she re-values a vendor’s objects. While she appears to be helping ‘less experienced’ stallholders, her valuations clearly run against the more formal elements of the market’s own ‘economy’, where the pricing of most items doesn’t exceed ten pounds (and where most buyers are unlikely to pay in excess of this figure). Her advice is most often fruitless, as vendors won’t have the facilities to ‘clean up’ their goods there and then. Vicky’s motivation for sharing her ‘expertise’ seems to stem from the opportunity to demonstrate her ‘knowledge’ rather than from philanthropy. As such, Vicky is the type of ethnographer defined by James Clifford in ‘On Collecting Art and Nature’, one who categorises, collects and evaluates according to some subjective criteria, and then presents this information within a new ‘arrangement’.2 It seems that by ‘going native’ Vicky’s ‘knowledge’ gains kudos. However, because this knowledge is not particularly helpful and the motivations underlying its production are self-inspired – let alone the fact that the practice of ‘going native’ does not necessarily reveal a truth in the project of ethnography – its very legitimacy is undermined. Vicky’s activities also highlight the broader issue of ‘value’ and how we might understand this term. Quoting Simmel in The Social Life of Things, Appadurai claims that those objects we consider valuable are those that “resist our desire to possess them” and that the ‘value’ of an object is depends on the “distance” between desiring and obtaining it.3 At the car boot sale this ‘distance’ is both relative and temporal. The low pricing of objects here suggests that the ‘distance’ of which Appadurai speaks is barely a distance at all. Objects are affordable, at least in relation to the prices they would fetch in the formal economy. Surely, then, the distance between desiring and possessing such objects at the car boot sale is relatively small.4 “You can’t be looking – it’s only money”, one stallholder appropriately sums up. However, the car boot sale is comprised by an economy in and of itself. This economy is not one that is subject to overarching rules/regulations but is, rather, selfdirected from stall to stall. While the event’s organisers request that goods are priced ‘low’ – a regulation instilled to facilitate the circulation of goods – the term ‘low’ is clearly open to interpretation. Any other rules that are imposed are self-regulated by the stallholders themselves. Pricing is not uniform across stalls and is certainly negotiable (with many vendors having ‘start of day’ and ‘end of day’ markers to differentiate their pricing system). Vendors will also amend prices in relation to specific buyers (i.e. somebody who ‘looks’ like they might be able to afford to pay more, will be charged

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

accordingly), while buyers are directed by their own self-regulating guidelines regarding how much they are willing to spend on specific objects.1 What this all means is that the ‘value’ of an object can only be indexed by the context in which it is being sold, as the way that ‘distances’ are negotiated continually changes across stalls and in relation to the expectations of both buyers and sellers. And we can see this being played out differently in each and every stall within the car boot sale. Vicky’s eagle eyes – her ability to make ‘transparent’ value that was previously ‘hidden’ – are simply another element of the differentiation of ‘value’ that emerges here.

Stuart Haygarth, Aladdin, 2006, glassware collected from car boot sales

003 “If I tell you I’ll have to kill you!”

Illustration from Picture Alphabet of Nations of the World, 1930s

Illustration from Peoples of All Nations, 1930s

“If I tell you I’ll have to kill you”, he says, when questioned about the origins of the commodities he sells. While I don’t doubt the joviality underlying this statement, it certainly serves to cut any further questioning short.6 Unlike the other regulars who set up stall at the car boot sale, he takes his time; prolonging the positioning/display of his merchandise well after everyone else has finished and started selling their own goods. Neighbouring stallholders guard his stall – as well as the two, large suitcases housing his goods – while he scouts the market for other items he can sell. As chaos ensues at the stalls surrounding his own, he carefully unwraps his commodities from their protective newspaper coverings, and places a select few on his faux-velvet ground sheet. New items are only revealed when those already on display have been sold. This ‘performance’, this weekly ritual, makes explicit the event-like nature of this – and indeed all – markets. As such, markets are a ‘stage’ upon which multiple performers can be seen to participate. They comprise both actors and an audience and

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

enable particular narratives (in this instance the assumed ‘value’ of objects) to unfold. The drawn-out process this particular stallholder employs when setting up his stall encourages a theatre-like sense of anticipation – with many buyers returning to his stall on numerous occasions throughout the day to see ‘what’s new’ – while his reluctance to answer questions about their ‘origin’ invites assumptions to be made about their history and value. Other stallholders at the car boot also participate in this theatre, as they churn out catchphrases or enthusiastically banter/barter with their audience. If the car boot sale is theatre in micro-scale, then it becomes ‘macro’ to each of the stalls it comprises – which are, themselves, stages both by virtue of the ‘relationships’ that emerge between commodities and between buyer/seller/commodity. The commodities on sale possess their own narratives (that are staged both by the vendor, and assumed by the buyer through association). In light of his distinctive performance as seller, and the carefully considered curation of his merchandise, this catchphrasewielding stallholder’s stall would appear to be a heightened example of this. Two particular items he sells, the ethnographic magazine Peoples of all Nations: A Colourful Pageant of all Mankind in the World of Today and the art enthusiast’s journal The Study, allow another narrative to unfold on this ‘micro-stage’. Both published in the 1930s, the former seeks to educate readers in the West about non-Western ‘nations’ within just 60 issues, while the later instructs the same readers as to what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art, which exhibitions to see, who are the ‘best’ artists and so on. Both would surely be assumed by today’s ethnographers/artists as being outmoded and irrelevant. Peoples of all Nations particularly, because it serves as a reminder of the impossibility of categorising a diversity of ‘nationalities’ in a totalising way and the dangers of eroticising the ‘other’, while The Study highlights the problems inherent in the practice of ‘valuing’ art. When these two characters jostle together, when one impresses on the other, another, more interesting, dialogue emerges.7 Being ‘collectables’ that contain ‘collections’ of information themselves, they remind us that the car boot sale is also such a ‘collection’ – of commodities, nationalities, variant economies and values – and the practice of studying such a market and presenting one’s findings is also a system of collecting, by virtue of making value judgements about what to include and what to ‘throw out’. Observing these two journals side-by-side, I turn towards curators of other ‘stages’ – specifically those that group together the art of certain ‘peoples’ within gallery institutions (the impetus for which seems to be ‘uncovering’ and performing new metanarratives, but under the auspices of ‘groundbreaking curation’). In the last five years such ‘fieldwork’ has proliferated – the Serpentine Gallery’s Indian Highway and China Power Station exhibitions, Africa Remix at the Hayward Gallery and Saatchi’s New Art from the Middle East are just a few examples – all of which reveal more about the value judgements of curators and a perception that these ‘nations’ have somehow ‘caught up’ with the West, rather than addressing the complexity and problems inherent in such a practice in the first instance. In making judgements about what to – and what not to – include on their ‘stages’, and by seeking to a produce a “fiction of the whole”, it seems that today’s curators are simply yesterday’s ethnographers.8

The value of Things

004 Temporary Contact Zones

There is a couple that frequently set up stall outside the perimeters of Holloway car boot sale, in an alleyway that leads directly to the market’s entrance. Located as they are, in this in-between area, they create another ‘contact zone’ in the network of markets in this area for people to coalesce.9 These restless and agitated characters frequently exchange monies with ‘customers’ but it is not clear what such customers are buying, as the goods on display are never taken away and don’t appear to change. (Initially I assumed these items had been acquired at the car boot sale, to be sold at a higher price outside its confines, in a space that the couple did not have to pay for. Now, I suspect, this is a front for some other, more dubious, activity.) In this in-between space, other stalls spring up and dissipate just as quickly. There is appears to be very little regulation here, only the self-regulation that emerges by necessity within each individual stall. Here, vendors avoid having to pay the stall fees required by the car boot sale and generally sell fewer items (presumably for ease of transporting the goods should they be moved on by the police). The car boot’s organisers turn a blind eye to these activities (but they do distinguish their market from this one, claiming that such stallholders sell contraband, while the car boot only sells ‘legitimate’ goods). The police will occassionally intervene and move such ‘stalls’ on (though this did not happen when I was at the site: they also turned a blind eye – it seems that this ‘market’s’ proximity to the car boot sale legitimises it). There is a continual flow of traffic (both buyers and goods) between both markets. This temporary contact zone demonstrates that, within every market there are both formal and informal elements at play, and that any measure of such elements is always relative. While the car boot sale might appear to be an informal market to London’s so-called ‘formal’ economy – high street chains, local businesses, the corner shop etc. – there is always a less formal market just around the corner. Like the temporary autonomous zones of Hakim Bey, the stalls that emerge outside the car boot sale, do so as an uprising to the rules and regulations that inform the more ‘formal’ elements of its economy.10 These stalls are autonomous, in the sense that they self-govern, but they are also reliant on the car boot sale for the flow of custom it provides. In light of this, then, informal and formal markets are entities not entirely separable from one another but, rather, inform each other in a continual relationship of retracing and rearticulation. Rather than existing in a dynamic of ‘inside’ or ‘outside’, Holloway car boot sale is simply the ‘micro’ to the ‘macro-scale’ of networked society, it selfregulates, is a site for value-judgements and ruptures to emerge, acts as a ‘stage’ on which performances unfold and space is rearticulated. Not only this, but it is the most pliable of tools with which to question the practice of its own study – fieldwork – and the ‘data’ that emerges from this practice as a result.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

I am aware that ethnography has long been a contested field, particularly with regards the production of ‘knowledge’ about ‘peoples’ and ‘nations’ being purported as ‘truth’, with little regard as to from which position this ‘truth’ is being communicated. For this reason, I have situated myself as a ‘character’ within this narrative, a character that has no more or less authority than any of the other ‘characters’ whose voices we shall also hear, and which is part of the story being constructed rather than a view from ‘above’. Even so, I still fall victim to the constraints of fieldwork: I must adhere to the “framing presumptions of what it is to do fieldwork” and “frame a local world” even while I am seeking to undo such traditions. (Marcus, George, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 3–33.)

“To see ethnography as a form of… collecting… highlights the ways that diverse experiences and facts are selected, gathered, detached from their original temporal occasions, and given enduring value in a new arrangement.” (Clifford, James, ‘On Collecting Art and Nature’, Out There: Marginalisation and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson et al (eds.), Massachusetts: MIT, 1990, p. 151.)

It is precisely the blockage that arises from not knowing the ‘psyche’ of some of these commodities, from being unable to “produce a kind of ‘silent enigma’ arising from processed of perceptual association” that allows them to perform on a different level. (See Anne Rorimer, ‘Lothar Baumgarten: The Seen and the Unseen’, Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, Alex Coles (ed.), London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000.

Georg Simmel quoted in Appaudurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 3.

Albeit it a dialogue that has emerged from their ‘pysches’ and the associations I derive from such ‘pysches’. 8

Marcus, G.E., Ethnography Through Thick and Thin, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 33. Antecedent to these recent exhibitions are those staged by Jean-Hubert Martin in the 1900s, Primitavism and Magiciens de la Terre, both of which sought to represent the art of non-Western nations ‘coherently’ but which, in fact, simply fell into the trap of producing a “fiction of the whole”.

A friend, who has been a regular to car boot sales over the years (both as a buyer and a seller) claims that prices having been consistently dropping at such markets over the years (because of the low pricing of goods in the ‘formal’ economy at such outlets as Primark, for example) as well as due to the effects of the ‘credit crunch’ (shoppers think they are more likely to pick up a ‘bargain’ here than in the ‘formal’ economy).

The buyers at the car boot are also ethnographers in a sense, picking and choosing items based on ‘value’ judgements that derive from subjective experience, and adding these to their car boot ‘collection’. While they might not overtly seek to produce knowledge about the car boot sale itself as an ethnographic site, the process of choosing specific items certainly allows a particular ‘narrative’ of their experience there to unfold.

There is also another market, Nag’s Head, just across the road from Holloway car boot sale.

Bey, Hakim, ‘The Temporary Autonomous Zone’, New York: Autonomedia, 2003.

Introduction

Shepherd’s Bush is home to a significant number of disparate communities; large numbers of the borough’s residents are non-UK born originating from Australia, New Zealand, Poland, East Africa, West India, Syria, Iran and Ireland. In terms of a history, initial interests led me to explore the migrant-value of the shifting sense of ‘community’. Unclear as to exactly what I wished to explore, and how I would go about discovering this, my initial visits to the market involved a series of experiential-focused observations. I walked its entirety, made small purchases and ate within the confines of Shepherd’s Bush marketplace during a mid-week, weekday. I then made the short walk across to the newly opened Westfield shopping centre and similarly wandered around examining the various sites that make up this complex. Overwhelmed by the numerous differences I began to mentally compile a list of what each site did and didn’t do, respectively. And yet, wishing to create more than a set of binaries, subsequent visits required a deeper look into the issues that began to emerge, those predominantly concerning the people that inhabited this space, their values and the sense of community that exists despite increasing migration. In terms of a methodology, choosing to focus on one market has enabled a ‘concentrated’ looking; beginning from a position stationed within, and yet ultimately enabling a broader looking ‘outside’ to wider issues and the surrounding social and cultural milieu. Observations

In order to gain a further understanding as to the intricate workings of this particular market, my time was initially spent observing the daily running, its activity and its characters; inhabiting a series of particular spaces (within the market) rather than attempting to analyse it enabled a further understanding of the larger issues including ideas surrounding migration and its impact on both a local and international scale. Shepherd’s Bush is, to a certain extent, as diverse (and subject-tochange and expansion) as many other central London towns. However, in terms of an identifiable context, this site is one of particular interest

Kate Self

Because of its History: An Exploration into Market Values

The value of Things

http://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/148008 ‘Diversity’, Global Cities, London, 2007. Interview held with Shepherds Bush Market Supervisor, March 2009.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

in light of the recent multimillion-pound Westfield development. “The estates around Shepherd’s Bush and White City contain some of the biggest pockets of deprivation in London with twice the average levels of unemployment.” And yet, according to the same local authoritymanaged website, the council “wants to use major development opportunities to improve the lives of local people”.1 A range of diverse communities are represented to greater and lesser extents in the types of goods for sale. For example the mixture of Somalian and Palestinian falafel stalls do not appear to be competing as they are there, in turn, for different kinds of audience. As demonstrated in, ‘Diversity’, a piece of text accompanying Global Cities, 2007, a recent exhibition at Tate Modern, it is possible to “foster a degree of integration amongst people from diverse backgrounds, celebrating tolerance and co-existence”.2 In this sense the market’s nature provides space for visible tolerance, open-communication and co-habitation. From One who Knows

A series of questions began to appear; who is the market for and who does it serve? Who manages and controls it? In order for the market to survive it relies upon those that trade and buy there. I had never intended to spend so much time with one particular site and yet in terms of my understanding, the positioning ‘within’ has, to a certain extent, allowed a view ‘outwards’. As I spent more and more time within the market an approach began to shift and it felt more appropriate to begin conversations with staff that worked there. At the individual market stalls this began informally as some traders were more willing to talk openly than others. On a more formal level several hours were then spent talking with a staff member that had spent his entire life living and working in Shepherd’s Bush. The supervisor knew both the market and its people intimately. My questions were mainly focused upon implications of the current financial crisis matched with the general loss, as I presumed to find, as a result of the opening of Westfield. However, most people I spoke with believed there would be no long-term implications upon the trade and income generated by the markets of Shepherd’s Bush. One trader confidently told me: “Westfield won’t give them what they need, what they want.”3 Profit margins aside, many locals were disappointed in Westfield’s supposed lack of negotiation and use of ‘local labour’ – both in terms of materials and resources. They found little evidence to suggest the use of local companies. The multimillion-pound re-development company sought work from elsewhere, outside the region and many believed this would have been for money-saving reasons and yet the development

Ibid. Ibid.

Cities and markets have sustained each other, the former providing location, demand and social context for the latter, the latter providing sustenance, profit and cultural verve on the former.4 Shepherds Bush market contains a myriad of goods, ranging from the exotic through to the everyday mundane. The vegetable stalls sell yams, cassava and breadfruit. Once more, the markets content clearly reflect the ‘significant population’. In terms of local regard the market’s individual characteristics celebrate the many stalls’ individual history and stories. This market has a self-labelled “down to earth, vibrancy about it”, you feel as though you have stepped out of W12 for a few moments and into somewhere ‘else’. Where else, exactly, is not disclosed and, yet, there certainly is a reference made to ‘the other’ and the unknown. When in a market the reciprocity between buyer and seller is mutually dependant, both traders and those looking to buy embody, and in turn, inhabit new social histories – it becomes a lived, live history. In terms of our cultural understanding of markets in Britain they act as places for exchange and communication. Marketplaces and their stalls have room for conversation and debate that modern day supermarkets don’t. Self-service checkouts are now fully automated and, in theory, one could enter a supermarket and spend their entire shopping experience in complete silence without interaction with anyone. Aisles funnel and farm you around the store and special offers and multi-buys are available to entice larger purchases and better value ‘in the long run’.

Market Values

team failed to see the long-term benefits of a holistic development plan that not only regenerated a local area, also ensured its own sustainability. Arguably the multimillion-pound development that boasts exclusive designer wear and car park valet services was never intended for them – why then should they work there? The entrances to the White City site are clearly marked on the nearby motorway junctions and transport connections to the area have been greatly improved, and yet, they imply those visiting are doing so from outside. Despite the market’s connectedness to the rest of the community those that worked there similarly were often not ‘local’ in the sense that many travelled for miles to Shepherd’s Bush market. When asked Why Shepherd’s Bush? Many traders answered “because of its history”, and yet the ‘history’, re-told, was not a clear-cut linear one, but rather a tangled weave of migration, shift, flux and tension. With such an unclear history how then was it one of the single highest features? I have to ask myself the question, is this body of research to do with ‘the history’ at all? Or is it more to do with the market’s significance – further still – its value?

The value of Things

Theorizing the City: The New Urban Anthropology Reader, Setha M. Low (ed.), 1999, pp. 232–235

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Prices of goods on market stalls are as stable as their physical stall themselves. It is easy to observe the – sometimes massive – fluctuations in prices depending on the day of the week, the time of day, the time of year and the person being sold to. However, benefits of this de-regulated system include the advantage to buy in units that suit you. Individual items can be bought in single, split amounts rather than pre-packaged rations (irrelevant of the legal implications). ‘Market prices’ appeal to a range of audiences, both individuals with a lower income but also to those consumers who consciously choose to shop at local marketplaces rather than large, corporate shopping centres. To use a market is to invest in something, to a community, its locality and topology. Markets are never situated out-of-town like large shopping centre complexes often are. Markets are situated ‘within’ and in order to access them you must enter them physically and abide to their individual codes and ruling systems. In terms of experience, we invest in the lure of the exotic, the sensual: to a certain extent – and quite paradoxically – to the other. Their grassroots self-organisation not only imbues a ‘fair’ price, there is also an investment – so my observations suggest – made in the individual stallholders’ expertise in their particular field. The value of this expertise can not necessarily be found in a large corporate store and maybe, by deciding to shop there, in part, you ultimately ‘pay’ for their knowledge. In the example offered by Setha Low in Wholesale Sushi ‘they’ (the market traders) “manipulate their expertise and embellish the cachet of culinary authenticity their products carry in order to catch particular waves of demand, they play central roles in mediating a process of commodification – perhaps arbitrage – between the changing cultural significance and the more wildly fluctuating economic values that are at the heart of contemporary Japanese consumption”.5 Regarded as highly talented specialists, Low continues to suggest the stallholder’s work is cultural, “creating meaning as it feeds the city, and linking global and domestic in complex and not always obvious ways”. Working, as Stuart Hall claims, to “stock the shelves of the global supermarket”.6 Stepping Through

In his introduction to Reading the Everyday, Joe Moran offers an insight to some of the key themes that reoccur within this collection of essays. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason Satre’s example of the bus queue acts as an almost performative, raw material that allows for a discussion of weightier matters of politics and philosophy. Satre sees the queuing system as an abstraction of the laws of political economy based on the competitive quest for a limited resource – in that particular case, seats on an awaited bus. For me it is the story of a market. The queue itself

Papastergiadis, Nikos, ‘Introduction’, The Turbulence of Migration, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 1–17. 11 Ibid.

The market operates as a micro, quasi-reflective, opening to a larger picture and voices the attitudes witnessed at ground level. Migration and movement has created uncertainty about the possibilities of settlement. Inevitably this affects communities who, according to their definition, require a certain level of ‘location’. Today migration, in terms of contemporary understanding, is not as it has been historically known; linked to famine, disaster and war. Increasingly complex for many it illustrates the radical transformation of modernity. There isn’t necessarily a want ‘for more’ or a need to escape arguably many people of the world are encouraged to move by culture and media – it is, in part, a society-driven activity. “Migration, in its endless motion, surrounds and pervades almost all aspects of contemporary society.”10 It is a system in which the circulation of people, resources and information follows multiple paths. “The turbulence of modern migration has de-stabilised the routes of movement and created uncertainty about the possibilities of settlement. The scale and complexity of movement that is occurring currently has never been witnessed before in history”.11 Migration is both lived and experienced, it creates its own metaphor and describes the complex forces that are integral to the transformational affect of modernity. In the introduction to The Turbulence of Migration, Nikos Papastergiadis observes how global migration of peoples re-shapes the political order and political theory. Despite the growing recognition that we are living in a far more turbulent world, a critical language

Moran, Joe, Reading The Everyday, Routledge, 2005, pp. 1–3. Ibid. Ibid.

Markets and Migration

is devoid of any wider meaning: “This unity is not symbolic… it has nothing to symbolise; it is what unites everything.”7 Remarking that, unlike a street festival or carnival, this group gathers with shared interest and yet they produce a “plurality of isolations”.8 Arguably, their choice to invest in this requires a certain amount of submission to the fate of their circumstance, “a ‘being-outside-himself’ as a reality shared by several people, which assigns him a place in a ‘prefabricated seriality’”.9 Despite Moran acknowledging the specificity of this example (and the notion that the orderly queuing system observed by Satre in nineteenth-century Paris is a far cry from the contemporary bus ‘queue’ in central London) there is something in this passage that animated what I had observed in the marketplace and for me enabled a steppingthrough the content of the issue in order to examine the bigger picture. However, with the case of the market (and this market in particular) it is this very investment in the ‘symbolic’ that I believe may be at the heart of my question. In a sense maybe if one understands what the market does, they can then, in turn, access what the market produces.

The value of Things

Ibid.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

and affirmative structures to address these changes have been lagging behind. For Papastergiadis a contradiction exists at the centre of all claims to national autonomy, “while the flows of global movement are proliferating, the fortification of national boundaries is becoming more vigilant”.12 On one hand our awareness of shifting and dramatically increasing migration does exist – and yet what is missing is a means to articulate and process this phenomenon. In order to regulate the increase in migration border control has increased and become more intensive, and yet, maybe markets and their porous nature are spaces that can accommodate this. Looking Beyond

Acting as global entities, markets are micro-political. They are sites prone to instabilities that operate both formally and informally and, despite their temporality, their identical structure and routine maintain themselves – often from within. Markets are indexical to the movement of people; there is a migration of what is sold as well as of those who buy and sell there. Markets offer a circulation that can be equally local, national and global. They are less formal than shopping centres, often cheaper and more likely to feel less intimidating especially if those shopping want to disappear and not be recorded. Markets offer the possibility to consume goods that are both legitimate (measured, regulated, taxed and imported etc.) and illegitimate (unquantified, smuggled etc.). Both legal and illegal items may be sold next to one another. Items may affect others in terms of their legitimacy, value and cost. New goods are constantly bought to and from markets dependent on the waves of immigrant trades people and their ‘geography’. Quite what hidden power systems I am beginning to uncover as a result of this project I am still not confident to say. However what is apparent is a reinforcement of a shifting emphasis from the centrally controlled and maintained system of development witnessed in this country earlier in the twentieth century. The latent affect of the Westfield development is far from ‘known’. Only time will tell the extent to which regeneration (that, in this case, takes power and resources away from the core) will entail. And yet what is known is that the market will continue to change and develop, those trading and traded too will shift in the same way that all trends do. The market will remain a model with structures, fluid enough to support a porous exchange that goes beyond that of material objects and focuses more on the ideologies of individuals that migrate towards such instable spaces. The discourse of the market enacts its dialogue; indexically the market is never fixed, never still and in constant flux.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

Fragments: Voices, Objects, Flows and Paths from an Eluding Economy

Its just wages, survival money.8

Elena Santaguistina

In order to find a way of sustaining their necessities, traders activate processes of mutual aid cooperation and interdependency, producing self-organised networks that cross countries, creating links between local and global, between ‘first world’ and ‘third world’; supporting both local economies and trans-national communities.9 We bring used things from home, some from our country and others we get them through friends.10

Two pounds, two pounds, two pounds, take any watch for two pounds.1 As you enter a car boot sale you are invaded by the overlapping voices and sound of the trading processes, of people’s comments, of children’s voices, of radio music, of the mingling objects.2 The space is crowded. Families, singles and groups make their way through the stalls of the playground. They fumble, scramble and rummage through the myriad of objects: hanged, displayed or piled on the floor. They are researching bargains. Yes. Bargains, bargains, bargains…. People are looking for bargains.3 The playground, on the day of the car boot sale, becomes both a defined public space for congregation and a sight of open exchange, contemporaneously the meeting centre of the community and a temporary point of convergence of a wide network of goods, markets and traders.4 It’s difficult to know all the traders. Some of them come and go. Others are new.5 The market is at the same time an index of a local reality and its incessant redefinition by the exterior references and influxes. It is the crossroad of an open system in perpetual transformation; it changes following waves of migration and importation, of objects devaluation and revalorisation. It is a microcosm, which reproduces the dynamics of a global phenomenon. One day you can find goods coming from one side of the world the next day from another. Car boot sales are full of objects of different époques and from the most disparate parts of the world.6 Car boot sales are formed by “the unstable confluence of divergent paths”.7 Paths are lines of direction, lines in space that take off from moving points; they are movement principles that have a force, an initial energy. Paths are traced by people that are on the move, often escaping, pushed by the research of a means of survival.

These informal trading structures, established on a culture of second-hand consumption, or on information networks and dealings based on personal relationships, are redefining the modes of circulation and exchange, producing “a new spatial order of social strata… from which new structures of civilsocietal cohesion emerge”.11 We try to help each other because we are all in the same situation.12 Sometimes, the stallholders sell their goods by telling their curious provenience, their voyage and story. Each object of the car boot sale may be thought as a body; a body whose skin becomes a track, a body that preserves the memory of the different lives that have become part of this fragmented story, a lived body that lays inside a theatre of representation waiting for a new journey. Journeys, where the act of purchase becomes for the customer a synonymous of encounter, of experience, one that can be real or fictional.13 I collect strange objects from all different places. Each time I find one it’s like finding a treasure, it’s a new discovery. It’s like travelling, like possessing a new identity.14 It is the object’s “histories and geographies which create and alter their meaning and value”.15 At the car boot sale a commodity’s value doesn’t depend, only, in its intrinsic characteristics, but also on its capacity of answering a specific desire, at a determinate moment and place, of making people dream, imagine, remember. “Value is never an inherent property of objects but is a judgement made about them by subjects.”16 It’s the value people find in things that varies according to different moments and places and to complex social and political mechanisms.17 And value at the car boot sale becomes even more variable and temporary since it also changes according to the unrepeatable negotiations, value is the equilibrium point of a unique performance. I remember I spent so much for one of these… in vacation years ago.18

The value of Things

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony Overview of the car boot sale, 2009

Stall of electronic products at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

Toys stall at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

Watches stall at Holloway car boot sale, 2009

Trucks at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

Dolls at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

Other times the origin and journey of an object is unknown or, rather, untellable. The object’s mysterious voyage inside a disordered truck, and its arrival at the car boot sale, sometimes has required the collaboration of smugglers that have been “obscuring the space and procedures of diverse but interconnected economic activities.”19 Sometimes I ask myself how some things get here? Like the new laptops that you can find for only 40 pounds. It’s amazing.20 The circulation of these objects, and the people who facilitate their movement, flow and travel with extreme facility, like fluids. “They ‘flow’, ‘spill’, ‘run out’, ‘splash’, ‘pour over’, ‘leak’, ‘flood’, ‘spray’, ‘drip’, ‘seep’, ‘ooze’; unlike solids, they are difficult to stop – they can pass around some obstacles, dissolve some other or bore or soak their way through others.”21 They disregard norms and boundaries, they don’t follow rigid schemas, their fluid elusion is “a creative constructive move, one which radically alters the very conditions in which struggles over existence are conducted” and permits to endure unstable situations, to overturn each obstacle, at the right moment, sliding and flowing around it, or through it, in a personal and ingenious way.22

I’ve been here 20 years, and I don’t know what else I’ll do… my future is uncertain, yes.23 Fluidity and instability, can assume “the marks of oscillation, of confusion, of game”.24 And it is precisely this “confusion”, “oscillation”, “game”, that represents a creative potential. It is a form of creativity that transpires through the peculiar modes of sourcing and of circulation, through the verbal techniques of trading, persuading and selling, through the negotiations and bidding mechanisms and through the very differentiated manners of exposing the objects. I start unpacking first the most valuable and fragile objects and display them in groups on the table… then I put the rest on the floor.25 The market stalls become platforms of creativity, small exhibition areas; and within their appearing chaos, variety and fragmentation, they often follow a specific criteria determined by the stallholder. Some stallholders sell only objects of the same nature. We can so find the stall of electronic products, the one of oriental silks, the jewellery stall, the children’s games stall, the

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

Paintings at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

Bricolage set at Holloway car boot sale, 2009

Grandmother’s stall at Battersea car boot sale, 2009 Paintings and knickers at Battersea car boot sale, 2009

stall of cracked CDs and DVDs. Others stalls expose all different kinds of ‘bits and pieces’ but the peculiarity of the objects varies following the story of the person that is selling them. We could so recognise the narrative of the grandmother’s life in her objects and knitting wear, or the characteristic of a fashion victim in his incessant necessity of getting rid of old things in order to buy new ones. It’s all branded clothes… and they have just been worn once.26 The variegated stalls, assorted objects, different languages and dislocated voices, fragments of the foreign and of the familiar, intertwine through unexpected rhythms and orchestrations giving birth to unprecedented harmonies. Polyphonies made of a variety of elsewhere and of their new relationality.27 A relationality where the value of each object is influenced by the object laying next to it, a relationality where displaced people interconnect, affect one another and create a “special collectivity”, a relationaltity where the cry of the traders interweave and become verses of a polyphonic chorus.28

‘Three for one pound, three for one pound.’ ‘Fifty pence on the floor.’ ‘Some other stuff new, brand new.’ ‘Fifty pence on the floor.’ ‘Three for one pound, three for one pound.’ ‘Fifty pence on the floor.’ ‘Three for one pound, three for one pound.’ ‘Some other stuff new, brand new.’29 Looking at the immense diversification present at the market, and speaking with traders, we find out that they are self-authorised to determine the modes of sourcing, the products on sale, the expositive techniques, the trading modalities and the pricing system. Only the rituals of opening and closure, and the costs of space, follow informal rules and regulations determined by the organisers of the market. Official entry is at 7 am, although some start queuing, or reserve places in the queue, overnight. Once all the stallholders have set up the organisers start collecting money for the stalls. The fees are 11 pounds for a car, nine pounds without and on Saturday 13 pounds with car, 11 pounds without.30

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The organisers of Holloway car boot sale are group of three fat men sitting at the rear end of the market on an elevated couch, from which they have an overview, and control, of the entry and of the entire market. They operate as Foucault’s “regulators of a milieu” whose main functions are those of surveillance and of “guaranteeing and ensuring circulation of people and merchandise.”31 Power relations are therefore actualised inside the market.32 Furthermore markets engage in the production of necessities that occur exercising power through the body.33 ‘The oil picture for you… I’ll make it only ten pounds.’ ‘I don’t know… it’s still a lot... but it would certainly make the living room look stylish.’ 34 At the market, thought, surveillance and governance are aimed, not to control, but mainly to defend a territory, and “such defence of territory is about defending the ‘right’ to be in the city, to have a place in it”.35 For both the organisers and the traders the fastest way of acquiring a space in the city, of entering the advanced urban economy and have a livelihood, passes through the creation and participation to informal markets.36 I came to London few years ago… the money from the shop wasn’t enough so I started selling things at the market.37 Informal markets are points where through different paths narratives of survival intersect; they are spaces “bristling with life, that is certainly managed and controlled but, that also flows outside this control”.38 As previously underlined car boot sales are partly unregulated partly self-regulated spaces, where formality and informality, legality and illegality intertwine in different measures according to the stall or to the economic activity. Here at times eluding, exiting forms develop: acts of smuggling, illegal trafficking or immigration, acts of ingenious and creative sourcing, exposing and exchange; “acts of democratisation”; acts that are “deliberated de-normalised refusals of the reasons of ‘the state’, elaborated with the very tools that consolidate the control society”.39 ‘Here everybody can sell or buy whatever they want.’ ‘Money… just paper.’40 Car boot sales are spaces in which the ruling power and established norms are partially suspended; they are a tertium quid between systems, a temporary autonomous zone.41 They represent a threshold to a different order; they are sites in which commercial conventions can be subverted, they are sites that elude formality or legality. Here not only “the illegal” can be “licit”, but also this “extra-legal space is productive for both smuggling and for the state”.42

The value of Things

I see lots of people selling illegal DVDs and stolen goods but I don’t see the police doing anything about it.43 Informal economies may therefore seem an alternative mode of creating incomes through parallel economies, of activating new flows of capital, of revaluating devalued goods, or of reallocating products. For De Soto they are a spontaneous popular response to resolve problems of underdevelopment through the expansion of free enterprise.44 I think the government needs to establish a policy to encourage markets... and let people have their social enterprise.45 However, as Mike Davis underlines, in reality they remain a site of condemnation, poverty and exploitation by forms of global control and our future “depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their terminal marginality within global capitalism”.46 Old things! The degradation by which his people had survived.47 Informal markets are an outcome of a world of imperfect systems.48 A world where advanced capitalism conduces to important inequalities between “the leading sectors that produce super-profits for firms and super-income for high-level workers... and the poor people”.49 The latter’s research of equality and of survival brings them to act as bricoleurs.50 Bricoleurs that by disassembling, imagining, conceiving, playing and reassembling things with the tools that they have at their disposal try to subsist, creating something new, and participate to on-going negotiations of power.51 The market is a place where bricoleurs materialise their claims, where the rules, uses and architectures of space are reinvented; a place where people come to play with the notions of value and transaction, to evade pre-existing norms and definitions, to join a performance and produce alternative exchange forms, new relationalities, new meanings. Informal markets, through a “distributed network structure” generate “immaterial goods” such as ideas, information and communication, they create new subjectivities and a different type of knowledge, a polyphonic enacted knowledge; they produce “bio-political alternatives”.52 They create “new combinations and strange instabilities… shifting the very terms of the system itself by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it”.53 They functions as a rhizome tracing “lines of flight”: lines in motion, continually whirling, folding, resolving and disaligning. They are sites of momentary convergence of flows of intensities, of eluding life forces that are embodies, temporarily re-territorialised and about to disseminate themselves again.54

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Trader. This study derives from a long-term observation of the car boot sales and informal markets of London and from the involvement with the people that constitute them. The approach adopted follows Köpping for whom fieldwork is a political and creative practice that works best when is open ended and when it produces new horizons through performative encounters, embodiment and participation in the field, shifting boundaries, reshaping knowledge and concepts. See Köpping, Klaus-Peter, Shattering Frames. Transgressions and Transformations in Anthropological Discourse and Practice, Berlin: Reimer, 2002. 2

3 Customer, Market Traders and

Customers Research: www.london. gov.uk 4 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 27. 5 Trader. 6 Trader. 7 Enwezor, Okwui, Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Lagos: Goethe Institut, 2002, p. 6. 8 Trader, Ibid., p. 33. 9 Mörtenböck Peter, and Mooshammer Helge, “Trading Places”, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2008, p. 148. 10 Trader. 11 Mörtenböck Peter, and Mooshammer Helge, “Trading

Places”, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2008. See also Nicky Gregson and Crewe Louise, Secondhand Cultures, New York: Berg Publishers, 2003. 12 Trader. 13 Gregson, Nicky, and Crewe

Louise, Second-hand Cultures, New York: Berg Publishers, 2003, p. 112. 14 Customer. 15 Gregson, Nicky, and Crewe Louise, Second-hand Cultures, New York: Berg Publishers, 2003, p. 112. 16 Appadurai, Arjun, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 3. 17 Appadurai, Arjun, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value”, The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 18 Customer. 19 Simone, AbdouMaliq, Spectral Selves: Practices in the Making of African cities, Johannesburg, 2002, p. 7. On smuggling see Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality”, Under Construction, Cologne: European Kunst Cologne, Verein, 2007. 20 Customer. 21 Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, p. 2. 22 Papadopoulous, Dimitris, Stephenson Niamh, Tsianos

Vassillis, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century, London: Plutobooks, 2008, p. 61. See also Nordstrom Carolyn, Robben Antonius C.G.M., Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 23 Trader, Nordstrom Carolyn,

Robben Antonius C.G.M., Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 41. 24 Vattimo, Gianni, La società trasparente, Milan: Garzanti, 2000, p. 83. 25 Trader. 26 Trader. 27 See Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984; and Irit Rogoff, “Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality”, Under Construction, Cologne: European Kunst Cologne, Verein, 2007, p. 121. 28 Bakhtin, Mikhail, “The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais”, Rableais and His World, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 187–188. 29 Different traders alternating, Battersea car boot sale. 30 Trader. 31 Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, p. 29. 32 Deleuze, Gilles, “Strategies of the Non-stratified: The Thought of the Outside (Power)”, Foucault, London and New York:

The value of Things Continuum, 1999, p. 75.

2006, p. 29.

33 Ibid.

44 De Soto, Hernando, The Other

34 Trader and customer.

Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, New York: Perennial Library, 1990.

35 Simone, AbdouMaliq, Spectral

Selves: Practices in the Making of African cities, Johannesburg, 2002, p. 9. 36 Sassen, Saskia, “Why Cities Matter”, Cities, Architecture and Society, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice: Marsilio, 2006, pp. 44–48. 37 Trader. 38 Das, Veena, and Pole Deborah, “The State and its Margins”, Anthropology in the Margins of the State, Santa Fe: School of America Research Press, 2004, p. 30. 39 Holmes, Brian, “Counter Cartographies”, Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, Janet Abrams and Hall Peter (eds.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006, p. 20. 40 Traders. 41 Bey, Hakim, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, New York: Autonomedia, 2003. 42 See Janet Roitman, ‘Productivity in the Margins: The Reconstitution of State Power in the Chad Basin’, Anthropology in the Margins of the State, Santa Fe: School of America Research Press, 2004, p. 218; and Simon Harvey, ‘Smuggling the State into Transgression’, Satic, Issue 2, London: London Consortium, 2006, p. 8. 43 Customer in Simon Harvey, ‘Smuggling the State into Transgression’, Satic, Issue 2, London: London Consortium,

45 Trader, Ibid., p. 16. 46 Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums,

New York: Verso, 2006, p. 202. 47 Barnes, Djuana, Nightwood, London: Faber Library, 1996, p. 2. 48 Mörtenböck Peter, and Mooshammer Helge, “Trading Places”, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2008, p. 148. 49 Sassen, Saskia, “Why Cities Matter”, Cities, Architecture and Society, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice: Marsilio, 2006, p. 44. 50 Mörtenböck Peter, and Mooshammer Helge, “Trading Places”, Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space, Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2008, p. 148. 51 Boeri, Stefano, “Eclectic Structures”, USE: Uncertain States of Europe, Milan: Skira, 2003, p. 434. 52 Hardt, Michael, and Negri Antonio, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004, pp. 79–95. 53 Stallybrass, Peter, and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986, p. 58. 54 Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Félix, A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. The

89 concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Guattari defines a non-hierarchical organic system, a de-territorialised space, a multiplicity of n dimensions, a space without centre, without form or stability. It is a de-territorialised plane of flux. The rhizome is (an) antistructure. It is an immensity of interconnections, assemblages and arrangements. It has no beginning and no end. It is the middle, the “inter-between”. The rhizome is a space of multiplicity and ephemerality. It operates by fragmenting and diversifying. Consequently it is a space where creativity is more possible. On dissemination see Brian Holmes, “Counter Cartographies”, Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, Janet Abrams and Hall Peter (eds.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006, p. 22.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

What would you Sacrifice?

given commodity depends on how much one is willing to sacrifice in order to possess the desired object. This symbiotic relationship between vendor and spender spans the gamut of markets and it is how things come to have value. The event that is valuation – an event that no one belonging to a given economy can evade – is plainly recognisable at the car boot sale; where it is manifest in the art of haggling.1 Every weekend cars assemble early in the morning in order to guarantee a space at the car boot sale in Holloway, London, as the sellers are allowed to set up their stalls on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. Though I imagined the market to be nothing more than the yard sales I had visited in California, the most striking difference I had noticed is that the car boot sale acts as a transient, yet consistent, network (rather than a spontaneous occurrence like the yard sale) where people come together in order to negotiate value. Many of the vendors set up stalls every weekend, selling furniture, produce, cosmetics, etc.. The majority, however, are one-time vendors who are intent on selling their personal belongings (generally for far less than they originally cost) to make a profit. Many are trying to rid of clothing, shoes, and jewellery that they have outgrown or to make room in their closet for new things. Others are moving house and selling the things that may ease this transition, and maybe even as a way to ‘start afresh’ in terms of lifestyle. Some are trying to escape their ‘pack-rat’ status by clearing out items that they deem superfluous. And others still, may be experiencing financial difficulty and are selling items that they otherwise would not, because money, as a means to provide necessary goods (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, etc.) becomes more important than the personal items that have imprinted on their surfaces the stories of their owners. At the car boot sales there is no permanency. The stalls are ephemeral and patrons can never expect to find the things they saw there the week before; that is, apart from the stalls that appear there weekly and keep the market stable. For the most part, the items themselves begin their journey as products of the dominant economy. These items are born in factories as commodities and are tagged with a price that is corporately agreed upon, given a multitude of factors (production costs, human labour, value of money at a particular time, etc.). These objects are then bought and accumulate a unique narrative that is created by a, sometimes, brief existence of belonging to an individual. Before the car boots sale the vendors survey their belongings and being the process of valuation. Which things are worth sacrificing for a reasonable about of cash, that is no longer equal to (and generally far less than) the price at which they were originally bought? The items that end up in the stalls were judged and their monetary worth is to be decided in the social process of valuation. As I walked through the entrance gates I stopped briefly at jewellery stall run by a woman who has chosen to give up an array or items for an, as yet, undetermined price. As passers-by peruse the necklaces, rings and bracelets on display she comments on the quality of the items, creating a platform from

Yvonne Pawlikowski

Hidden from the plain sight of passers-by on Holloway Road, in a schoolyard deserted on the weekends by the children who play there during their breaks from class, is where one of London’s many markets takes place. As a temporary resident of the UK, originating from Los Angeles, the concept of a ‘car boot sale’ was novel to me. Once I had realised that the ‘boot’ in question has little to do with footwear and rather denotes what I have come to know as the ‘trunk’ of a car, I had immediately related the car boot sale to the ‘yard sales’ I had frequented in the US as a method of either bargain-shopping (during times when money was scarce) or as a leisurely weekend ‘treasure-hunt’, so to speak (when things were looking up, financially). The similarities between car boot and yard sales are explicit enough. They generally involve vendors’ intent on selling their personal items for a monetary profit; thus, the majority of objects for sale are second-hand. The shoppers who patronise the sales are looking for either discounted necessary or practical items (i.e. clothing, kitchenware, hardware, etc.) or simply searching for trinkets proving that ‘one man’s trash’ really is ‘another man’s treasure’. Whatever the reason may be for the attendance of both buyer and seller, they inevitably participate in an act that is accepted only on the fringes of the general economy: haggling. Though I can’t say that I have ever attempted to haggle the price of an undamaged designer handbag in a department store down to suit my economic status, I expect store management would not kindly welcome this gesture. To account for the reason that haggling is accepted and even expected at the car boot/yard sales and not in corporately owned stores I suggest beginning by discussing the process of the valuation of things. The creation of exchange value is at its essence a social practice. No market, whether corporate or otherwise, would likely turn a profit if consumers were unwilling to spend money or exchange other valuable objects. Both consumer and vendor are bound by the desire to possess what only they can provide each other with. Putting a price on things is not a onesided affair; rather it is a sociable event that takes place in the gaps of human interaction. In order for a thing to have a price, it must cost, obviously. To acquire the object of desire a consumer must sacrifice a thing that is believed to be of equal value. In other words, the amount of money one spends on any

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

The value of Things

which to negotiate an exchange value. She names a price, “ten pounds for that silver chain”. As a potential buyer begins to walk away she lowers the asking price to seven. She has piqued the shopper’s interest, but the price is not worth it in the eyes of the potential buyer and so it is haggled down to five pounds. It is at the moment of agreement between two people that value is created. The deal is done. For both of these women, something gained and something lost. As I wasn’t in the market for jewellery that particular day I continued walking along the well-organised asphalt path of stalls to a table littered with antiquated trinkets. In a container on the edge of the table were coins from various parts of the globe. Though many of the coins were currently in circulation and have a value determined by the global market – a value that changes daily – their particular value is negotiated by the two people involved at the car boot sale. Other coins were outdated, which made them even more valuable to coin collectors. It is their scarcity that plays a role in determining value in the same way that art or designer clothing considers rarity in the process of creating value. Scarcity can be attributed to the discrepancy between the price of an authentic painting by Pollock and a reproduction of it, and for some, scarcity plays a major role in the decision to purchase. The booth selling old coins and antiques seemed to attract those who search car boot sales, and other such marginal markets, for hidden treasures, of the authentic sort, as a hobby or as an investment. Many of those coins, for instance, have most likely been added to an individual’s collection in an attempt to complete or satisfy a personal interest. Others collect as an investment, foreseeing the increase in the worth of an object when its presence on the market becomes sparse and a greater importance is placed on the quality of infrequency and obsolescence. Collecting coins and other objects that may one day be the stuff of Antiques Roadshow, though interesting enough, is not a personal interest of mine, and so, I kept walking. There was a stall selling complete dining sets, that I would, in another time and place, liked to have spent more time considering, but because my stay in London is temporary, being in the possession of many things is far from ideal. The cost of their eventual transport to Los Angeles will cost more than I am willing to spend. Despite being tempted by the colourful patterns and sheer bargain that the dining sets offered, I passed them by and eventually ended up at a stall with various household items including toys, clothing, shoes, porcelain figurines and still other seemingly random items. What caught my eye was a lamp. The last time I was in the market for a lamp I had spent, or rather splurged, on one that was advertised as ‘designer’. Though the lamp cost more than I had ever thought I would pay for one, as a student of art history and having a particular interest in the art world in general, aesthetic value had made its way into my process of rationalising value at that time. After having spent an hour in the store, walking by and considering the lamp time and time again, I finally thought to myself, “I must have it” and carried it to the cashier. As I left the store,

with receipt in hand, I felt the sting of having sacrificed, what to me, was a lot of money, but was overjoyed at my purchase, nevertheless. Standing at the stall in Holloway and judging the value of the lamp, I could not help remembering this previous lamp-buying experience. My system of valuation seemed to have changed, since the lamp I was now considering was far from ‘designer’ and had a rather kitschy appeal; touch-sensitive with three settings and florally decorated. What it did have, however, that I was desperately in need of, was the capacity to illuminate my room and keep my eyes from strain. The woman working the stall asked for five pounds. She told me it was a great lamp that would end up in her nephew’s room if it were not sold that day. I bought it for three pounds. The dusty old lamp now sits on my desk and aids my late-night studies. It is now embedded with my present experiences as a postgraduate student in London and it will come to witness papers that have yet to be written. Though aesthetic value, during my trip to the car boot sale, played little to no part in my eventual decision to buy the lamp, perhaps it will be the reason that someone else buys (or chooses not to buy) it at the car boot sale that it will most likely end up at – when it comes time to sacrifice those possession whose value will not be worth the cost of sending them overseas. Perhaps someone will haggle the lamp down to a mere one pound. As things, like my lamp, journey across various markets they persistently re-emerge and continue their journey accumulating a past, present and future; their means of travel exists at the crossroads of human exchange.

Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 1–58.

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The value of Things

Chinatown

the numerous restaurants that served tea and dim sum to tourists and locals alike. With visions of mob men smoking enigmatically dancing around his head, Ben strut down the street towards his favourite shop in Chinatown – the DVD shop. Turning the corner, Clara slips beneath the arches of the ‘town’, quickening her pace. Every time she comes here, Clara cannot help but feel that she is part of some secret club. Snippets of conversations catch her ear, all in languages she can understand, all of which she can eavesdrop in on. She rolls her eyes at tourists snapping photos, acting as if they had turned the corner of this modern metropolis only to find themselves in another world, gaping at the vegetables piled up in cardboard boxes and the glistening array of roasted fowl and meats on display in various shop windows. As she passes a pair of young, fashionable girls picking through a pile of satin, embroidered Chinese slippers she can’t help but smirk at the ridiculousness of it all. The shop advertises ‘Authentic China’ – mainly coin purses, Chinese-style dresses with deep slits at the sides, folding fans and other such wares. Honestly, how many young Chinese girls are seen shuffling about in slippers such as those? She, for one, would not be caught dead in them. “These are gorgeous”, says one of the girls, bedecked in Indian-style bangles and earrings, an African print dress and gladiator-style sandals. “How much?” asks the other, similarly dressed. “Five”, replies the shopkeeper, flashing his open palm. “That’s a bit much isn’t it?” answers the girl, “how about two pairs… for seven pounds?” “No, no, no, no. Five each”, says the shopkeeper, pointing at each pair whilst flashing his open palm each time. “Two for eight or no deal”, answers the other girl, taking a step back. “Okay, okay, okay…” the shopkeeper relents, waving his hands at the girls to come back. The girls grin at each other, digging through their little satin embroidered coin purses for the correct change. Clara, sighing inwardly, keeps walking. Lauren is on a shopper’s high. The feeling can only be described as finding that perfect little dress in the perfect size and it’s 50 per cent off. She loves all the little knick-knacks that only cost her a few dollars… a fiver at most. She had recently gotten her own place and decorating it cheaply was more difficult than she had initially thought. The usual places she would have considered somehow left her apartment feeling… cold. Here, she had found all she needed – bright colours and patterns, rich materials, with a bit of that worldly, well-travelled flair. She and her friend Alice have been perusing the shops for a while. Now they are laden down with bags containing paper lanterns, some folding fans and a couple pairs of Chinese slippers. Feeling rather tired but sated, they begin to head for the gates when they notice a little hole-in-the-wall shop, hardly noticeable beside a large DVD/CD shop. Curiosity getting the better of them, they decide to have a look. Eyes adjusting to the dimly lit store, the girls see the usual array of wallets and purses, most made of plain leather. “Not very inspiring”, whispers Alice. Lauren has to admit that she was right; there wasn’t much that really caught

Alaina Chan

Lurid red pillars, bright green ceramic tiles glinting in the sunlight. Two white marble lions fiercely stand guard, eyeing all who dare to pass. To enter, one needs to pass through these gates. To leave, one must again pass through another set of gates. What does one expect to find in a gated ‘city’ within a city? Somehow these gates connote difference and separation, yet the space itself is enveloped by a larger space – a pocket within a larger fabric. People say it’s sleazy and dirty, warn their children not to venture into the back alleys, but still they come. To buy their ‘fruit and veg’ because it’s cheaper than their local supermarket, to get their meats from an actual butcher who would cut it up as they wanted, to examine the still-moving crabs in the fishmongers with tongs. Maybe it’s also because it feels different, every time, depending on rain or shine, but still open for business per usual. The three to four blocks that constitute ‘Chinatown’ always seem to be ready to do business, not even on Christmas do they shut their doors to potential customers. The availability, the accessibility, what one can buy – they go hand in hand with the informality of the place, being a part of and apart from a wider city. Here, people call out to you. Granted it might be in a language that you do not understand but the meaning is always evident – Come! Buy! And the mix of people, people coming to buy groceries, tourists visiting the city for the first time, and locals (or natives?) who come with their families to shop, eat and socialise. Every time Ben passed under the eyes of the golden dragons snaking around the columns of the entrance gates, he felt like he was stepping into another world, where the rules are slightly different, where he is not a native but, still, an honorary member. He loved the ‘grit’ of the place. Or is the grit merely a figment of his imagination, a product of watching all those Hong Kong gangster films he loves? To be honest, he cannot tell the difference between the reality in front of him and the so-called fiction he watches. The men who stand in front of their shops, smoking and dressed in white t-shirts and flip flops, somehow seem more than mere shopkeepers. They must be crime bosses by night, thought Ben, swapping their daywear for half-buttoned silk shirts, jade rings and gold chains. While they pretend to lazily watch the activities on the streets, they are actually doing reconnaissance work for their smuggling ring. All the comings and goings are discussed between these men as they play mahjong in dimly-lit rooms tucked away down dark corridors in

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

her eye. The old lady sitting behind the counter looks up absentmindedly when she hears the door open but goes back to watching her programme on the television. Just as they are about to leave, a young man walks in, carrying a small, plastic takeaway bag. Seeing Lauren and Alice, he smiles and says: “Please, let me know if you see anything you like.” Upon seeing the young man, the old lady slowly gets up, the rickety chair creaking as she does. Waving her hand at the man and muttering some unintelligible words, she turns and slides through a pair of curtains that hides what looks to be some kind of backroom. The young man past the girls and places his food on the counter. He then turns to face them and says, “are you ladies looking for anything in particular?” and flashes them another right, welcoming smile. Clara steps into Ming’s Video the shop she works at. She sees the usual suspects: some older businessmen looking for some music from the golden era, and of course, the mobster wannabes that hound the DVD section and

The value of Things

always ask if the DVDs come with English subtitles. There was one guy, a regular, who always asked for slightly more obscure titles. Not that these films were particularly old, but they were definitely not of the new and hip. He did seem to rather relish the moment when he asked Clara for a certain title and she did not know it. It seemed to give him some kind of satisfaction. She could picture him being just as annoying in restaurants, asking for dishes that the ‘locals’ eat, not just some tourist concoction. “Y’all right, Clara?” Clara snapped out of her reveries to see the local police patrol, Will and Ritza. They were a fairly regular fixture and could often be seen strolling up and down the streets of Chinatown. Besides that, Will liked to come in for the latest action flick; he said it helped him unwind. Clara calls out a greeting as they continue on their way, popping into the handbag shop next door. “He is fit!” thought Lauren. She turns to look at Alice, who, by the looks of it, has just found something she liked in the shop. The young man is dressed

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

casually, in a t-shirt and denim jeans, but his appearance is clean-cut and his smile is very charming. Both girls say simultaneously: “Oh, we’re just shopping for a purse.” The attempt at nonchalance is lost by their obvious effort. “Oh, well, we do have more stock in the back that we keep for our special customers”, says the man, “usually our regulars come to me specifically if they want something in particular. I try to help them find what they want as best I can.” He smiles again, slowly, and asks, “would you like to see what we have in our backroom?”. The girls, mesmerised, nod and follow him through the thin, cloth curtains. The young man stops at a door on the right, unlocks it and flicks on the light switch. As the girls step inside, they are momentarily stunned to find a designer showroom with track lighting highlighting several designer bags. Lauren could not believe what she was seeing, designer bags, in pristine condition, just as you would see them in designer boutiques. With a brief glance around the room, she already recognised several well-known brands. She swivels around as a crucial thought occurs to her. “How much are these bags?” she asks. The young man smiles again and says: “We have special pricing for special customers. Please, take a look around and do let me know if you find something you like.” The girls do not need to be told twice. Gingerly picking up a rather large wallet, Lauren noticed the lettering etched on the circular clasp. “Hermès!” thought Lauren. Getting over her initial surprise, her skepticism kicked in. “Must say ‘Made in China’, it can’t possibly be the real thing!” She opens the wallet and is astonished to see: HERMÈS PARIS MADE IN FRANCE Stamped in gold. She looks closer at the seams and feels the leather. “If these are fakes, they’re very good fakes”, she thinks. “How much is this one?” asks Alice, holding up a beautiful, deep green leather tote. “For you, 50 dollars”, says the young man. “Really! That’s so cheap!” gasps Alice. As Ben nears the shop, ready to bombard the poor girl who usually works behind the counter with requests for obscure Hong Kong films, he sees a police car parked outside. As casually as he can, he strolls past the shop and glances inside. “All seems normal”, he thinks, “no one from the blue patrol… but they’re sneaky, they are”! Scanning nearby shops, he notices two officers sitting by the window of a little diner, having lunch. They seem rather engrossed in their meal, slurping up noodles with the delicacy of a hoover. “Holy shit!” thinks Ben, more than a little alarmed. Visions of being thrown against the hood of the very police car parked in front of him, makes him stumble backwards into two boys who are heading into the DVD shop. Ben wants to yell out “it’s a trap!” but the words die in his throat. The boys look at him strangely and walk in. Looking back at the diner, he sees the cops have

The value of Things

conveniently finished their meal and are casually getting up from their table. Panicking, Ben sprints away from the DVD shop, turns at the gates and runs straight out of Chinatown. Two police officers, a man and a woman are standing in the centre of the room when Lauren and Alice step back into the shop. Lauren can see a police car parked outside. Both girls clutch their newly purchased bags closer to them and attempt to casually walk past the officers. Just as the girls reach the door, the male officer turns and says, “nice bags you have there”. Lauren spins around and is about to say, “thank you, it was quite expensive”, in the haughtiest voice she could muster but is beaten by Alice. “They’re fakes!” she squeals. “You don’t say…. I never would’ve guessed”, says the female officer, more in admiration than admonishment. The male officer chuckles and says: “Let’s get back to work, eh Jess?” And to the girls: “You two behave now.” Both officers leave, the jingling of the bell above the door the only sound in the shop. Clara, knackered from a long day at work, flops onto the couch and flicks on the television. After a long day at work, she is usually in the mood for some mindless sitcom. This time, however, something on the news makes her sit up and tune in. The newscaster is talking about a smuggling ring that has been uncovered by police in some Chinatown somewhere in America. Young women from China had been brought over believing that they would be given decent jobs but were instead forced into prostitution or working in sweat shops to pay off the ‘handling fee’ of being brought into the country. The newscaster moves onto the next item of the day – the national budget. Clara switches the channel and settles on a rerun of EastEnders.

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Introduction

Lexicon

Looking at the market as a stage where various systems and logics compete against each other, the essays follow the winding and often disappearing trajectory of various operations at play, from formal to informal, to illegal to criminal. The interaction of all those segments makes for the dense, intricate and colourful fabric of the market dynamic. It comprises many different levels of operations and activities, from the most mundane and obvious ones, to the obscure and invisible. The two essays and narratives within this section focus on the conversations between the informal and formal, exploring lines of flight which continually ride in and out of both spheres, connecting these supposedly binary entities. Through exploring the social life of commodities within Brick Lane Market these lines of flight become clear. One essay uses the subject of stolen bicycles, to make concrete these lines of flight which make connections outside of the market through their trajectories in space. Also connecting with virtual spaces where the victim of bicycle theft creates an effigy through mimesis and contract in the hope of effecting the original. Throughout the essay there are continual ruptures like that in the rhizome mapping of people realising the theft of their beloved bicycle. Through these ruptures and connections the essay opens up the performance of the market to outside itself.

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Rhizome

A rhizome is formed of materials of very different dates and speeds which form lines of flight, movements of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation and ruptures which exist in connection with each other. Through these connections each arrangement thus becomes changed within its nature. A rhizome mapping produces relationships which would have been previously hidden. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are concerned with the rhizome in One the Line and Thousand Plateaus. Trajectory

Line of flight of an object through space over time. Mimesis

One essay plays with mimesis through making a copy of an original, creating an effigy through the contact forged with the original to effect it, a two way street. Whereas the other uses mimesis in a biology stance where it is an act in which an organism, the mimic, takes on a close external resemblance to a specific organism or an object, the model, in order to benefit from the mistaken identity. Identities and actions are situated in multiple loops of causation, opportunity and constraint.

– Nigel Thrift, ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space The other essay works through an individual’s narrative, to follow links and connections to the macro-realities of the market, touching upon the economic, social and existential aspects. Manoeuvring between three different markets (Brick Lane Street Market, Brick Lane Flea Market and Spitalfields Market) and a self-appropriated space of an unlicensed street seller, the essay navigates the writer’s observations through the fluid areas between formal and informal economy.

Michael Taussig plays around with mimesis within his book Mimesis and Alterity. Survival Tactics Practising everyday urban survival always generates ghostly correlates of an actualised possibility that collapse the difference between near and far.

– Nigel Thrift, ‘Afterwords’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space The Invisible

The market as a space constructed from open-ended relationships, providing a series of connections, relays and circuits of operations, emerging and disappearing again. The sense of death related to the capacity for sudden transformation, of being able to completely transform oneself into something else, to go elsewhere.

– AbdouMaliq Simone, ‘The Visible and Invisible’, Remaking Cities in Africa

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Survival Tactics

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105

Me I can see him.

Zuzana Flaskova

I don’t feel confident enough; I am not sure what I am looking for, what is this that I yearn to unearth. I find a narrow alleyway a few streets away. I need to sort the dictaphone. There is an empty police car; irrational feeling of complicity and wrongdoing gets hold of me for a second. Then I relax and put the dictaphone in my bra, feeling like a complete idiot. I adjust it a little and test it. Couldn’t feel more stupid.

Him It’s a bit breezy today. The shirts and the jacket are flying in the wind and flapping against the board. At least it’s not raining. The plastic torch looks a bit sad. And Steve spent a good half hour cleaning it; it was all grubby and filthy. But then, he enjoyed himself doing it, blubbering his nonsense, philosophising. God knows, someone might get it and think that it’s actually in a good shape, but then, maybe they’d get it anyway.

I return and start talking to him. He’s very accessible and laid back. The other two guys are much more cautious, not happy about our conversation. I am terrified that if I make a wrong move the dictaphone will slip out. I talk about the project and the research around markets and he seems quite intrigued. He asks me about my college and nods approvingly. I feel increasingly fake and unethical.

People know if they want stuff or not. They just look and know. The girl will not come today then. She’ll think I wouldn’t be here. But I’ve sold in much harsher weather. I stay till I can bear it and when it makes no more sense I pack the stuff and go. That’s what I like about selling here. Being my own master. Nobody tells me how long I must stay or when I have to go. I stay the whole day if I am enjoying myself. She didn’t seem to believe that the stuff sells. Well, it might and it might not. But it has never really made me think why people want it, because I know it. They want it because it’s nice and they’re willing to spend a pound on it. I wouldn’t sell anything I wouldn’t like or wouldn’t have any use for. Nothing is absolutely useless if you get some pleasure out of it. You find it aesthetically pleasing, you want to have it in your home, keep it, you want to look at it for a while, you might want to sell it or give it away…. Who knows? Not me.

I leave to take the dictaphone out, fearing that the other two or somebody else might see me. I come back and ask him if I could interview him and record it. He doesn’t have a problem with it. I pop into the café opposite to get us both coffee and then we start talking. I am totally baffled by the stuff he sells, or rather the potentiality of anyone buying it off him. But he seems confident that it will go. A young man comes on a bike and makes an offer. He turns him down and suggests some other place to go. The young man seems a bit irritated and disappointed. I am quiet, the other two sellers nearby are glaring at us. A while later another boy stops by with two plastic bags with protruding cables and battery chargers. A few hours later I ask him about it. Who were the guys who stopped by earlier? “Oh, that must have been before I came today.” I try to correct his memory describing them and the circumstances. “Oh, I wouldn’t remember.” I don’t push it any further.

She was looking at me with disbelief and a second later she spotted the shot glass. I offered her another glass with it, two for a pound. But she only liked that one. She was happy to give me a pound for it. You see, people know what they want. If they want to buy something that I have just put on the pavement, well, it’s theirs. And we can negotiate a price. I want to get rid of it and I want them to have it, if they give me what they think it’s worth.

I say I am starving and freezing and it’s time for me to go home. He says he’s getting hungry too. He opens his coat and takes out a small bottle and takes a sip. It’s olive oil. Just the thought of the oily feeling in the mouth makes me gag.

Jay came in the morning. I knew she noticed. Bad timing. Anyway, I am sure he got rid of it round the corner. Cheeky little bastard. And then, Matt, with two plastic bags full of the stuff. Naughty boys, both of them.

I know.

“It’s good for you, olive oil”, he says. His jaw is inflamed so he cannot eat anything solid. “It’s nutritious and good for your stomach.”

I look at the stuff and think hard how can this be of any use to anyone? Then I spot a shot glass. It’s well grubby but I collect them. I buy it for one pound and take it home.

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We agree I come next weekend to talk a bit more. When I get home I put the shot glass in a pan of boiling water to clean it. I take it out, put it in the sink to wash it. The moment it touches the cold sink, it cracks. I go there again the week after to talk about the stuff he sells. Where he gets the things from, how much did he pay and why he chose them. I know he gets some of the stuff from second-hand shops and that he also returns some of it back if he doesn’t sell it. I am interested in the journey that these things take…. I can see from the bus that he is not there. I come the week after, he’s not there and neither the other sellers. I come the third and the last time. He has gone, or maybe he has never been there at all…. Notes Mistletoe and Biodiversity or formal and informal economy as next-door neighbours Mistletoe was long considered a pest killing trees and natural habitats. Only recently it has been recognised as an ecological keystone species, as an organism that has a pervasive influence over its community.1 See www.botanical.com Mistletoe grows attached to the host, and as partially parasitic plant it extracts nutrients and water from it by sending roots into the bark. It spreads through the bird droppings, which contain the seeds, land on a tree’s bark and germinate. The dense evergreen mistletoe foliage makes for an excellent roosting and nesting place. The tendency to such nesting is far more widespread in avi-fauna than has been previously recognised. A study of mistletoe in junipers concluded that more juniper berries sprout in stands where mistletoe is present as the mistletoe attracts berry-eating birds. Such interactions lead to dramatic influences on diversity, as areas with greater mistletoe densities support higher diversities of animals. Like the mistletoe, the informal economy had previously been considered as having mostly negative effect on its environment. The debate on the informal economy and its interaction with regulatory environment started around the 1970s with the rise of unregulated economic activities in Africa. Since then the assumptions about such relationships have changed considerably.

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It is no longer thought that the informal economy is mostly comprised of temporary tactics and activities and would gradually wither away with progress. The informal economy is ‘here to stay’ and expanding with modern, industrial growth.2 See Martha Alter Chen, Rethinking the Informal Economy: Linkages with the Formal Economy and the Formal Regulatory Environment, DESA No. 46, July 2007.

Markets, with their various levels of economic transactions and trading activities present a natural meeting point of formal and informal economies. The relationship between these two is often fluid, sometimes more sometimes less transparent and can border on or stray to illegality or criminality. I tried to observe the linkages and slippages between the informal and formal economies through an individual’s narrative set against the background of the macro-realities of the market as a space of many competing logics. Regulation as Protection or license as a good manners contract While having an informal chat with the local authority market officer it transpires that the place where I spoke to the man actually falls under the authority of a different borough. The officer knows him, indeed. He is harmless, a nice chap. He used to “trade” in the temporary semi-formal flea market. The flea market was established to include the “rogue” small-scale sellers in some sort of formality and regulation. Or, in other words, to keep things in order and to keep the street out of trouble. The main issues to look out for were alcohol consumption, possibility of selling as a facade for other more dubious activities such as drug dealing and street skirmishes. The five-pounda-day ticket seems to have functioned mostly as a token of submission to the officer’s authority and a form of swearing allegiance to decent behaviour and unwritten rules of good conduct. This kind of licensing and registration was mostly about keeping check on a potentially rough patch of street with non-professional traders. The flea market was situated under the railway bridge and comprised of people selling mostly bric-abrac off blankets or sheets on the street. The real market, is situated further up the street and is clearly distinguished from the flea market both by the range and kind of goods on sale and also by its architecture of display, which prescribes selling either from a stall or from a minimum of 20 cm off the ground platform. The real market license ticket is 36 pounds per day. When the flea market closed down due to the railway tracks reconstruction, some sellers took the next step and became part of the real market, others have disappeared. Or, like him, some have based themselves further away from the regulation but still close enough to the marketplace.

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Mimesis or subversion, adaptation and appropriation as survival tactic “Identities and actions are situated in multiple loops of causation, opportunity and constraint.”3 Simone, AbdouMaliq, The Visible and Invisible: Remaking Cities in Africa in Documenta 11: Platform 4: Exhibition Catalogue, Okwui Enwezor (ed.), Kassel, Germany, 2002.

His spot is just round the corner from there, as if an organic overspill off the official site. Though he has no license to sell, the proximity of the official market affords his activity a tacit validity of a job, the job of a trader/seller. The nearby market mise-en-scène makes his role more convincing, he performs it, if not within, then at least near the main stage, to the target audience comprising both the market goers and passers-by. Yet, he bases himself at a safe distance from the market in order not to be reproached by the authorities. He subverts the system by avoiding the registration and licensing for various reasons, but chooses to appropriate the basic modes of social existence such as having an employment or a ‘profession’. Formally, his activity takes the same shape as that of professional market traders. The traders at the nearby market are there to make profit. His motivation is slightly different. It seems to be mostly to do with the performance of the role of a seller, as someone having a job to go to. It’s about sociability, about keeping up with the social rituals of having a job. Conspicuous Consumptions vs Conspicuous Parsimony

The Spitalfields Market is teeming with shoppers, browsing, choosing, buying. The amount and diversity of goods on offer is overwhelming. After the massive regeneration bid steered towards further gentrification and hip marketing of the area, the market aspires to present an alternative to the high street consumerism. But rather than an alternative it becomes a variation on the same theme. A slick marketing performance of a market. Looking at the stuff that he sells, which resist the term goods, it is hard to imagine it to have the potential of a commodity. Yet its exchange value is essential. It’s got the capacity to cover the expenses of a minimal livelihood. Food and bed for the day. In order to sell, you need the goods, the seller and the buyer. He is confident people come and buy what he has to sell. I am less enthusiastic about his potential customers. I cannot see any. I’ve been there for a good few hours already and not a person stopped

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by. I leave and come back later. One look at his stuff, it’s all there. Slightly re-arranged but nothing is missing. We talk, he doesn’t complain, it’s a good day, in his words. I leave again. Come back much later. It’s all there, nothing has gone. Not a thing.

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“The Owner of my Bike, works somewhere around that Pole....” Marie Crick

They (the police) questioned him and his answers were enough for them to let him go with my bike. He was a French student who had bought the bike from Brick Lane Market in London for 50 pounds two weeks earlier.1 – Priscilla And with the end I begin, with the hidden side of Brick Lane Market where Priscilla like many others has discovered her stolen bicycle being sold there. Yet this illegal trade gets lost amongst the bric-a-brac, clothes, music, art performances, trendy people and tourists trying to discover the hip East End of London. The word amongst online blogs is that Brick Lane Market is the first place that victims of bicycle theft go to in the hope of being reunited with their beloved bicycle. Every Sunday the market sees the return of many people looking for their beloved, one man even took the law into his own hands, when he discovered his bicycle; he promptly hit the seller and rode off with it. However, many others are not so lucky. My bike was the best present anyone has ever given me and now it’s gone. When I got my bike, I joked that I should name it. I’m glad I didn’t for even though my bike remained nameless, in losing it I genuinely feel like I’ve lost a friend.2 – Joe Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen. Away from the heavily regulated markets of Up Market and Spitalfields (which reside under one roof where standards are constantly checked and where the type of product must come under the umbrella of unique, self-designed and handmade only, therefore not mass-produced or imported) starts the sprawl of Brick Lane Market.3 It is here where stallholders, (some with stalls but mostly with blankets and who are regulated by Tower Hamlets) set up their wares and it is in the gaps and mainly at the peripheries that the bicycle sellers hide. They may well be highly visible to these victims of theft when the location of their bicycle ends here, yet to the tourists and Brick Lane enthusiasts it remains unbeknownst, somewhat invisible. The closer one gets, the more invisible it becomes, it is only through these bicycle trajectories that it becomes clear. This invisibility within the market, works in the traders favour, as the circulation

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continues, it seems the police cannot do much about it. Priscilla discovered this when she contacted the police on the happy discovery of her bicycle. “So they [police] turned to me: ‘In his limited English we believe he is in good faith.’ There was no crime and because I hadn’t reported the theft at the time they couldn’t refer to any criminal record either. They could do nothing – it was a civil matter.”4 Likewise this story is very similar to that of Julian who, after discovering his bicycle was stolen from the courtyard of his flats in Shoreditch, came across it on a Sunday wander through Brick Lane Market, he tried the police but to no avail, he couldn’t prove it was his and he couldn’t bring himself to buy it back. Indeed the police officer in the film The Bicycle Thieves, remarks “nothing, only a bicycle”, when a fellow policeman enquires into the topic of the man reporting a theft.5 To make it even harder for these victims and the police, these traders continually change their location. Moreover this is not the only place which is notoriously difficult to police, amongst the blogs there was continuous mention of other thefts occurring around London, a mysterious bookseller appeared many times within in these tales. This mysterious bookseller, mysterious due to his continual movement, has almost become a fable in his own right. Like the bicycle traders he sells stolen goods and is well-known to the police but, because he operates on the boundaries of councils, no-one will take responsibility for him, he even sends people out to shoplift to order. His story has become a tale of who has seen him last, the sightings being Farringdon, Liverpool Street, Waterloo and London Bridge stations, “underneath the arches at the St. Thomas Street entrance. The tinker.”6 My girlfriend Hannah and I have had our bikes nicked today from the top of Broadway Market, opposite the Cat and Mutton pub. The fuckers cut through my Kryptonite lock in broad daylight in a busy market!7 – Henry Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen. Through these blogs I was inevitability led to social networking sites such as Facebook where various people had created groups concerning their stolen bikes. These groups mainly consist of people venting their anger and conversing with other affected people, mirroring something of an online support group, or as a heuristic tool for the return of their bicycles. Like Facebook, Karmaarmy.com is another social networking site, however, it was created especially for spreading the word of bicycle theft. It is an inventive site where, once an affected person posts the information of their loss, alerts are then placed on trading sites such as eBay and other forums. These intimate descriptions and photos, “the after imagery of that contact in all its displacements and effusions”, within these websites become effigies, an attempt to create a copy to affect the return of the original.8 Using words to press close, to ossify, “Specs Specification follows: Colnago Extreme POWER 2007 EITA colours, 56 cm sloping, geometry”, to capture the physicality and thus create exact doubles of their beloved and, in doing

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so, possess the power of the represented. These entities produced by ephemera of a memory produce new virtual spaces, with diverse entryways allowing bloggers and effigies to converse with each other allowing them to be passed on. These effigies are created by a variety of people, showing the heterogeneous nature of bicycle theft that flows in and out of all strata of society, indeed it has generated many discussions with every person I have had contact with since starting this story. It happened on a Saturday, sometime after I dropped my daughter off at music school, leaving her bicycle chained to railings outside. When I went back to collect her, the bike was gone, the only trace of it a dead-looking cable lock, cleanly severed at the throat.9 – Claire Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen. Even though bicycles are generally mass-produced like many other commodities, and through exchanges become belongings, these bicycles transcend this, becoming more. This is in evident Joe’s description of his bicycle: “I’ll think about the laughs we had undertaking taxis and weaving through rush hour traffic. The time we nearly died being cut up by a bendy bus or the confusion caused by an empty cardboard egg tray suddenly flying into our path.”10 A bond is forged with his personified bicycle through the hours of close contact and this is something that continues after its disappearance. Through the excessive amounts of time Joe has spent with his bicycle he has become steeped within the object, become intertwined in the life of that very object, and before the moment of rupture their lives have run parallel. Memories become forged with the bicycle; for example Mark describes how it was the moment that he gave Karen (his future wife) a lift on his bicycle to the ferry that she started to look at him differently. Therefore when a rupture occurs, when this visceral quality of the exchange that unifies the owner with its bicycle is broken, great loss is felt. The way he experienced the bicycle, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, we sentiently experience an object “not in our brains but, rather, in the place where we see it”, is no longer possible, this outside ourselves experience becomes ruptured with the absence of the perceived. Security gates to communal courtyard and car park broke. Kids found out. Bikes were getting stolen every night. Residents left amusing/righteous notes up in foyer warning everyone and complaining about lack of police action. But then I found they’d stolen my bike and the notes were no longer as amusing as I now felt as they did and this was made worse through the pains of the insurance claim! – Mark Sweatwan Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen.

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The imitation that takes the form of effigy is interwoven with contact, as it is through the memories and descriptions that are, “testimony to the fact that contact was made”.11 The two-way street of contagion and the interwoven mimesis however are not enough to ensure the return of their beloved. This is apparent in the rhizome mapping (formed of an agglomerate of bicycle trajectories of different dates and speeds) which moves beyond the dichotomies and binaries of mimicry, where most of the lines of flight are incomplete, and do not circulate freely. The points which they reach are limited (only to the search for the bicycle thus stunting the viscosity of the flow trajectories). “We will not see that bicycle again for all your mother’s prayers and all the saints” however, there are some complete mappings such as Priscilla’s, where the bicycle is discovered in markets such as Brick Lane or through its purchase there.12 “It can exist at a distance, coming back or returning much later, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture, and multiplicity.”13 Many lines of flight connect with Brick Lane Market and other sites, such as Dalston and other markets around London, showing the performance of the market outside itself, showing that it is these places which generate the most connections with the other arrangements; it is through these relations that Brick Lane Market becomes decentred amongst the other actors. My cousin got his bike stolen in Slovakia, he was cycling all round Europe, he found a very nice bar in a cellar and got on well with the locals, and he stayed in a hostel and chained his bike to a lamp post opposite. However the next day he was devastated to discover that the thieves had dug up the lamp post and stolen his bike. – Glenn Small Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen. It is only through inventive ways of tracking stolen bicycles such as the Police Cycle Operation, where they place tracking devices upon bicycles which may ensure the return of the bicycle, and in turn a complete mapping, which connects the near and far. This moves beyond the mimesis and contact, to a becoming of the bicycle and owner, “the two becomings intertwining and relaying each other in a circulation of intensities that always pushed the deterritorialisation further along”.14 Therefore allowing the rhizome to introduce new multiplicities opening up into new concrete trajectories outside and beyond the ones already explored (illegal bookseller and the online blogs) and stopping the blockages that occur where the bicycle’s trajectory is hidden through the unknown. This would make concrete the whispers of the different hands the stolen bicycles are said to go through, where rumours around the market say that the thieves leave the bicycles they have stolen locked to a certain pole where these bicycle traders know where to find them. These new tracking devices are also used by the police to open beyond that of the flows of quasi-legal bicycle theft, by using them as tools to uncover further illegal economies such as the drugs trade, burglar, and other stolen goods. This growth of dimensions changes the very nature of the mapping through increasing its connections and allowing these new trajectories to

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occur. This would further highlight the deterritorialisation of Brick Lane through the informal trade of bicycles, as it becomes evolved in the global communities conjoining with reterritorialisation as it joins the global community through the Internet blogs it connects with, and other sites and informal economies within London. My beloved light blue solo which my dad had bought me in Rhos on Sea when I was 15, I discovered had been stolen from outside Camberley station while I was commuting from there to Farnham Art School. I felt like someone had removed a limb. – Mark Sherrington Another distraught bicycle owner discovers their beloved bicycle has been stolen. Bicycles become commodities with histories that are steeped in the formal and informal, continually riding in and out of both spheres and thus connecting these supposedly binary entities. Their trajectories continually change between illegal to legal, for example when the police claim back bicycles from these illegal traders, when they cannot prove their ownership, the bicycles become legal again through this fleeting ownership by the police. Then, after a certain time has lapsed (when no-one claims the true ownership or can prove this ownership), they are then resold through licensed traders on Brick Lane Market. The “cycle of cycles” as the controller of the market calls it. Like other commodities the passage of time is recorded within these transitional objects and does more as it becomes “the petrified historical event where nature passed into culture, where raw material combined with human labour and technology to satisfy cultured design. The commodity is a theatre of operations in which honest labours achieve stunning metaphysical effects.”15 These stolen bicycles sit alongside outmoded commodities being sold in Brick Lane Market (unlike the newly born commodities and art pieces of Spitalfields and Upmarket) which osculate “the power of the ghosts” which the surrealists believed to be “embedded in the commodities created by yesteryear’s technology” which bring people from far and wide to Brick Lane to purchase them.16 One bicycle trader offers an array of spare bicycle parts and ‘bargains’ are to be had. One consumer purchased a Bianchi 2007 worth £1,200 new, for only £120, and comments: “The kids are very accommodating. You can haggle, and one even threw in a free bicycle pump.” Indeed it was one of these very purchases by a French student that completed Priscilla’s bicycle trajectory: What’s very funny in all this story is that I keep seeing my bicycle locked at that pole. The new owner works somewhere around that pole.17

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In Memorium 2006–2009

In Memorium 1980–2007

http://digilander.libero.it/felixpetrelli/bicyclethieves.htm http://www.rarefm.co.uk/shows/somenews/in-memoriam-trek-800-sport-200.php Janson, Charlotte, The Old Truman Brewery, interview, April 2009. http://digilander.libero.it/felixpetrelli/bicyclethieves.htm

De Sica, Vittorio, The Bicycle Thieves, Arrow Films, 1948. Pandora: http://www.kudocities.com/cities/london/conversations/ why-don-t-the-police-stop-the-sale-of-stolen-bikes 7 Moving Target: http://www.movingtargetzine.com/forum/discussion/1397/ stolen-bikes-broadway-market/ 8 Taussig, Michael, ‘Sympathetic Magic in a Postcolonial Age’, Mimesis and Alterity, New York; London: Routledge, 1993, p. 250. 9 Armistead, Claire, ‘Securing Bikes’, The Guardian, Wednesday, 2 April 2008. 10 http://www.rarefm.co.uk/shows/somenews/in-memoriam-trek-800-sport-200.php 11 Taussig, Michael, ‘His Master’s Voice’, Mimesis and Alterity, New York; London: Routledge, 1993, p. 220. 12 De Sica, Vittorio, The Bicycle Thieves, Arrow Films, 1948. 13 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, ‘On the Line’, Semiotext(e), 1 June 1983, p. 34. 14 Ibid., p. 20. 15 Taussig, Michael, ‘His Master’s Voice’ Mimesis and Alterity, New York; London: Routledge, 1993, p. 233. 16 Ibid. 17 Priscilla: http://digilander.libero.it/felixpetrelli/bicyclethieves.htm 6

In Memorium 2000–2008

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Play of forces

Markets Tales â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Geopolyphony

Play of forces

Introduction The play of forces is the web of interconnectedness of people, things and the resonance between them. It is a specific type of temporal space that is constantly shifting and reforming, producing new engagements and relations with a multiplicity of social strata. The play of forces holds the future and the past in a radical flux, calling upon a polyphony of voices to edit and re-edit these relations. Within it, storytelling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a language of fictions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; begins to break down grand narratives and assert itself as a dynamic response to the surprises of shared informal space.

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Informality situated within the vast and unlimited spectrum, the minute increments of the shades of grey are represented between poles of black and white. The market attracts those diverse people and activities that are juxtaposed in a common space. In this way, markets form a unique and singular space composed of a multitude that produces new meaning that counters dominant discourses and powers. Learning to take pride in this singularity, by self-identifying it as unmarginalised position (and so redefining terminology around the informal), entails a paradigm shift; questioning the constituted dominance of the formal economy.

The city as it is determined by discourses dictated from above. Use of spaces, regulations and bio-particulars form and control all aspects of urban life. In the moments of encounter, mediation between diverse people and things together move towards the re-configuration and generation of new subjectivities and cultural forms. Hovering below the surface, beyond a visible, in a field of forces, inter-social resonance produces a means of self-articulation of the city from below.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Play of forces

Lexicon Confinement

Disciplinary containment which serves to control deterritorialising forces. It functions as a centripetal force that isolates and encloses in order to regulate and dominate non-normalised forces.

Fiction

Objects on sale sit next to one another in a strange relation; drawing the visitor’s attention to the temporal cohesion of affects normally only possible in fiction. The artificiality it presents punctures the illusion devised by advertisers of a better life through shopping allowing you to inhabit the present as part of the shifting reality of the market story.

122 Field of Forces

The dynamic, spatiotemporal convergence of the market represents an overlapping of social forces that are in tension with each other.

Immanence

At the market you lose any inhibited sense of yourself; the anonymity you’re used to at the supermarket, the passivity of the cinema hall, etc.. The stallholder calls on you to listen to his story and you engage with all your five senses and your wits. The objects on sale become simple props for this embodied encounter: the body of the market relates to the responses of your own body, an immanent politics relevant to and emerging from within both entities.

Intensity

The point/territory/space where forces converge and depart. A nodule in a rhizome where meaning is produced by the relational reverberation of a congregating multiplicity, and where new forms of knowing can be experienced. A meeting point on the plane of immanence where restless undercurrents are intensified and made visible. The take-off platform of lines of flights, and their point of return. Never stable; an overspilling of energies in which the market embeds itself.

Narrative

In a market the truth told by the seller is not fixed. He modifies his narrative according to the expectation of the costumer at the adjusting his performance at the precise moment of their encounter. Equally, the buyer also performs a narrative in which he acts out his trusting or pretending to trust the seller. His performance embodies the expectation that he seller wants to satisfy.

Play

A jouissance, a mode of free improvised interaction with various actors in the market – caught in-the-moment within an open system. A live invention and re-invention of rules and boundaries of a temporary game space.

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Production

The social interactivity that unfolds in the market between people and objects produces a certain type of space that is formed of the networks and routes making possible the exchange of objects, dialogue, language, symbols, etc..

Resonance/Reverb A collective movement towards emergence from forces

emitted through a shared connectivity within the swarming activity of the market. Truth/Untruth

The relationship between the seller and the costumer is based on trusting. The seller asserts himself as the truthteller, connecting the costumer to the producer. The information he provides, whether actual or fictional, is intertwined with his aim: selling. The customer chooses whether or not to believe the information he receives, but he will only buy from sellers that offer him something similar to his expectations.

Julia Morandeira

On a Saturday morning, the end of Ridley Road greets the comer with a vibrant chaos of vegetables, natural health remedies, pirate CDs, kitchen devices, halal butchers and fish stalls, all mixed under a cloud of contrary smells arising from incense burning and rottening food, with a background litany of reggae beats pierced by shouts of instant offers and an animated cacophony of languages: welcome to a synesthetic carnival. Ridley Road Market is without doubt the hub of Dalston town centre, well known for its wide offer of products ranging from vegetables with complex names – chows chows, dasheen, white yam, palm oil, ortaniques or shea butter – to textiles popular in Africa, the Caribbean but also worldwide. The label of “Afro-Caribbean” commonly applied reduces the wide array of products, customers, traders and stories that can be discovered, revealed or hinted. At the turn of the century, Dalston was home to an important Jewish community. During the 1950s, due to shortages in UK labour force, Afro-Caribbean immigration increased and Dalston was one of the neighbourhoods where this community settled, having a profound impact in the composition and activity of the market. The following decades saw the arrival of many other groups from British ex-colonies fleeing conflict, such as Turkish Cypriots, and political refugees as from Albania, Kosovo and Iran. In this horizon, the trading activity appears as a way to access the economy, the citizenship, and as a social engine for the communities to imbricate. The concentration of these products acts as a metonymy for many sort of cultural engagements and performances, and constructs the market as a place of encounters: not only commodities have a social live, but they are a trigger for sociality.1 The market reveals itself to be a fundamental element of the social and urban palimpsest it is embedded in, written and rewritten by the different communities migration layers and personal journeys of asylum seekers or labour immigrants, that furthermore engage with wider geographies of British colonisation and decolonisation, struggles of postcolonial subjectivities and destabilise the romantic mythology of Hackney as a land of non-conformists.2 The products, the traders, the customers – all carry the inscriptions of personal and collective stories, merging the space of the market in a polyphonic web

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Foucault, Michel, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, Paris Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Milieu is understood as the field of relational forces we inhabit and in which the power 4 Agamben, Giorgio, ‘On Security and Terror’: http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben- on-security-and-terror.html is deployed. Ibid., p. 18. 5 In the past months the regulations have stretched from six to 16 pages: http://www.hackney.gov.uk/street-market-trading-regulations.pdf For an excellent and detailed information of the actual changes affecting Dalston, please visit: www.opendalston.blogspot.com

Market Intensity

Play of forces

Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, The Social Life of Things, Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. “It has been for centuries now a place that has respected points of view that are different from the mainstream; a place to which people have come to find refuge from the family and social pressures of being in some way different. We are a non-conformist borough and that’s part of what makes Hackney a good place to live in.” Councillor Geoff Taylor - Hackney Citizenship Ceremony: http://www.hackney.gov.uk/xp-factsandfigures-history.htm

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

of interconnectedness, where new cultural and social relations, meanings and knowledge are constantly re-invented through the resonance, reverbs and echoes they relationally establish. However, the plurality of forces the market inhabits appears as a menacing disorder to the authorities, a multiplicity that has to be captured, its dynamics understood, its effects and affects calculated to be then forecasted. The rationale, techniques and apparatuses of management of the possibilities created by this heterogeneity of phenomena is what Foucault defines as the technologies of security: the ability to understand the plurality of linked phenomena that constitute a milieu in order to plan it, maximising its benefits while minimising any inconvenience.3 In order to control this milieu, the security technologies reactivate and make proliferate a whole set of juridical-legal and disciplinary techniques. If security acts as centrifugal force, regulating the circulation of elements and events of a given reality, on the other hand discipline isolates, confines, prevents and prescribes. In short, according to Agamben, “discipline wants to produce order, security wants to regulate disorder” and their point of convergence can be found in the police.4 Foucault depicts the police of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the set of precepts and actions aimed at increasing the forces of the state while preserving its internal order. Therefore it is possible to state that its aim corresponds to the level of security while its methodology depends on discipline: the police proceeds through a set of regulations, constraints and limits or facilities and encouragements, acts through the detail and the instant, thus imposing order to restrain disorder. From cutting the electric supply to multiply the street market’s regulations, a whole set of policing techniques have been deployed by Hackney Council to regulate and control Ridley Road Market in the context of Dalston Redevelopment Plan, part of the urban regeneration provoked by the coming of the Olympics to the area.5 Invoking health and safety discourses, legal requirements and hygiene regulations over commodities and their trading have been enforced. Last year it was still possible to find around seven stalls selling toys which, due to their irregular status, have been cleared out of the market. It is rumoured that clothes trading will be targeted next, and fresh produce trading will also be endangered if the escalation of over-regulation continues. Adding to this, the parking rates have risen (20p per day) and double yellow lines have been painted all down the road, meaning that any trader taking more that 15 minutes to load or unload their van will be facing a parking fine, an amount to be added to the annual business parking charges. Most of the traders have resigned driving to the market every morning, using instead public transport to carry all their merchandise/stock. On top of this, women toilets are now a paying service (20p again), having as the only remain possibility

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while unique nature, a nature that is rendered visible through spectacle. Muñoz, Francesc, Urbanalización: Paisajes comunes, lugares globales, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2004.

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10 “Urbanalisation” a concept coined by Francesc Muñoz to define landscapes transformed into an exchange value that reveal a new generic

the public toilets in Kingsland High Road, which are without charge. But the most blatant attack to the traders has been the prosecution by the council of traders deliberately singled out convicted for selling in pounds and ounces, not in kilos, and for trading by the practice of the bowl or the bunch, which does not state the weight of the produce.6 The traders prosecuted, known as “the metric martyrs”, have been accused of not respecting the European Union laws imposing compulsory use of metric weights and measures.7 The European Commission vice-president responded with the announcement that the British could continue to use non-metric measures; imperial system is now to be restored again as a legal practice. Nevertheless, the martyrs have to pay their fine. This case illustrates how security devices can make use of these “tolerated illegalisms” in their benefit; they can either be consented, to allow certain fluxes to circulate, or be inverted and used by the disciplinary apparatus as effective techniques to prescribe and restrain. The porosity and flexibility that informality entails proves to be a liminal space of possibilities: while allowing certain acts and behaviour to play and escape the norm, it can also be the channel for disciplinary power to act. Security’s playground: when it entails a benefit and increment of the power’s forces, toleration is applied – but the space remains always available to be reverted and used in a contrary way. A year ago, the council disconnected the electric supply to the whole of the market, justifying the shutdown on health and safety grounds. The traders now rely on generators or share the electricity supply with the local shops on the street, a fact visible in the jungle of wires that have invaded the space between the stalls and the business behind. Moreover the council has compelled the traders to vacate Birbeck Road’s coldstore as following the fire (a commonplace in Dalston these days) it is regarded as a potential safety hazard and is now to be demolished.8 However, now considered a “development opportunity site” along with the whole of Ridley Road Market, the urge to clear, clean the urban space now that the Olympics are nearer is multiplying the coercive measures aimed at neutralising local agents. The plans of relocating the Ridley Road Market off Kingsland High Street with lesser but bigger pitches, raising the rent to obtain significant revenue have been considered by many as the transformation of the market in a “cash cow”. But because these plans would imply moving traders off their pitches, Hackney Council faces the obstacle of permanent licensees which benefit from legal safeguards. The council has already tried to revoke many licenses by direct and indirect means, and just recently has issued letters to around 20 traders advising the recommendation of non-renewal of their licenses.9 Under this over-regulation and imposition of draconian conditions, the traders have organised themselves to survive the adversities. But many

Play of forces

9 The most notable case was Bonner’s story: http://opendalston.blogspot.com/2008/10/hackney-council-to-redevelop-ridley.html

directives, imposed compulsory use of metric weights and measures: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/07/13/do1310.xml 7 For further information: http://www.metricmartyrs.co.uk/ 8 http://opendalston.blogspot.com/2008/08/another-dalston-opportunity-site-burns.html

6 This practice near-universal in London’s street market was adopted after the new laws created such confusion over weights and measures in 2000 when EU

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

confess being exhausted and many others have already given up, a fact visible in the alarming number of empty pitches that break the continuity of the line of stalls. All the traders interviewed agree that the actual market situation is the worse ever experienced, and recall with nostalgia days “when you saw new faces everyday, and you did not have a moment to sit down”. As all these stories amount to prove, the police are intrinsically related to urbanity. Moreover Foucault admits that it is the very condition for the urban since the police rise from the regulation, control and general disciplinarity of individuals and the territory. Urban regeneration is a key technique of security in its goal to produce urban order by ensuring the management of every possibility, the circulation of flows of goods and population, while expelling any undesirable nuisance. Through their rhetoric, urban policies are not being enforced but made desirable, thus producing social consensus over the erasure of any trace of conflict, a rationale identified by Foucault as govermentality. Some years before, Guy Debord and the situationists had already signalled urbanism as one of the contemporary system of domination. In this sense, the new Dalston raises over the destruction of spaces of social production, history and memory that are to be replaced by new buildings fundamental to finance Hackney Council’s plans of “prettification” of the area. But by “urbanalising” and homogenising town centres only one goal is achieved: historic urban amnesia, and social anaesthesia. Erasing any trace of conflict means to obliterate the genesis of the space.10

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What do all these observations, reflections amount to? Ridley Road Market is revealed as a world inhabiting other worlds; an intensity where a plurality of forces converge and from where a myriad of lines of flight depart to partially traceable, partially hinted geographies of urban clashes, biopolitical control, informal economies, postcolonial migration journeys and stories… deterritorialising fluxes to be contained by retorrialising regulations activated by security and disciplinary technologies. And so, the market operates as an indexical device to calibrate many issues, domains and forces: an index of governance and governmentality, that evidences the degree to which we are governed and controlled; and index of conflict and the state of counter-power resistance; an index of movements of people and goods, of social composition and re-composition; index of cultural engagements, of meaning production…. A platform from which to navigate to yet unknown geographies, a node where new engagements are produced, an intensity from which to explore new knowledge and new forms of knowing.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Playing-grounds: Imagined Space and Limitless Possibilities

Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1950, p. 3. Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, London: MIT Press, 2004, p. 565.

Ashley Wong Lilla flicks the dust off her jacket. She grazes past the fence of her school and wanders through the gates. It’s past 1 pm and everyone is still in class. She jumps on the curb, squats and stares at the ground. Patterns mark the surface of the pavement. She never noticed the markings before. They look like abstract lines, shapes and colours almost like a Mondrian: blue, red and green shapes connected by white lines. The lines intersect creating different paths and infinite possibilities to play and invent. A performance space, a space where actors etch out new meaning and form a practice through social relations. She looks up at the building of the school and ponders the structure, an establishment for education and the instruction of young citizens for integration into society. In the city, the modern empire stands, projecting an order and place and role for all people. But Lilla? She doesn’t go to school. She lives in a society of control where everyone is fixed in the records by the state by name, location, origin, education, work, age, gender and status, except Lilla. In fact, that’s not even her real name, she doesn’t remember what it was or where she came from. Instead Lilla dances through the streets freely, sneaks through alleyways and ducks under gates and railways finding her own routes and purpose. She engages with the world and embodies it. She allows the experiences to flow over her, making up her paths as she goes along. Saturday morning, the playground of the school is vacant. The space is occupied five days a week as a place for young students to break from class, to run, play and release energy. The two days remaining in the week properly named ‘Saturday’ and ‘Sunday’ leaves a fissure, and possibility for re-appropriation, inhabitation and use. A space once occupied within a given time of day or week cycle, produces gaps within the movements and rhythms of regulated operation. Like weeds sprouting from the cracks in the rubble the ecology of culture seeps into the crevice and makes life.

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Play only becomes possible, thinkable and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.1 – Johan Huizinga

Play of forces

A site is created by those who inhabit it through the interactions and relations between bodies within it. A ‘magic circle’, an illusionary space manifests in free-play, guided by a frame that soon alters and shifts in shape. A space is continually imagined, created and recreated forming a mobius image of the city. A plurality of subjectivity is produced by actors participating in the game. Collectively they re-form and re-shape the boundaries of the game in play. Lilla peers through the holes in the metal fence. The grounds have transformed. Cars are being loaded and allotted into the space, tables are scattered, blankets are laid down and individuals lugging large black bags of stuff fills the space. The clutter, the chaos, the commotion rises in the air. A ‘car boot’, a strange word to enunciate, which does not exist within common English vocabulary elsewhere. How did it emerge in practice? How did it become in language? Lilla circles the periphery, watching as the space emerges as a new site, a new game space for play. She enters the space, it is an overwhelming sensorial experience. The sights, sounds, smells, touch, movement and impressions of the environment, she becomes a part of it. She is in the middle of it.

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Because a game by its nature has room for the movement of free play, it is always possible for players to drive a wedge into the system, bending and transforming them into a new shape.2 – Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman Lilla wanders through the car boot. There are diverse goods, mixtures of peoples, a plethora of activities and action. From the new, used, fake, antique, broken, fixed-up, to the home-made the goods are spread throughout. Combinations and permutations of things proliferate within the space. Used shoes sit next to toothbrushes. Fake handbags from China sit next to boxes of old records. Electronics keyboards sit next to cheap watches. People are brought together from the all the local ethnic communities. It is a play of things – mixed up and placed together in a complex cultural context. Lilla comes across a table with an elderly Indian man and his son selling an array of computer goods from keyboard mice, routers, speakers, cables and memory cards. Neatly displayed, the goods look new and still in their original boxes. She recalls from Slumdog Millionaire the incredible IT boom taking place in India and the role the country will play in the global economy. She sees their stall as spillage of the larger economy, benefiting from the grey zone and subverting the movement. They are stuck in a game of capital flows, but find ways of making it their own. She sees them as a possible entry into a larger international circuit and trade. In a globalised economy, they offer

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Play of forces

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Mörtenböck, Peter, and Helge Mooshammer, Trading Places, New York: Distributed Art Publishers Inc, 2004, p. 161.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony entry into a world of trade hidden in the underbellies of a larger discourse. In the car boot they are caught in play in a much larger scale of the game. Lilla continues through the crowd, bodies bumping into her bags. The sounds overtake her. Loose change slinks in a pocket, a woman gawks at some shoes, a siren sounds from the streets screams in a call of order. It is the sound of space in production, of free-play and live exchange. Hovering above is the sound of control. Lilla recognises these utilitarian objects, household devices, food, cleansing products. They are all life’s necessities, mundane artefacts of human culture, objects from life, from kitsch to the mass produced and the lost and forgotten. At the same time she finds they are all the goods that do not have a place is proper society from the damaged, the expired, the defective, the copied and illegal. Slight off, slightly used, slightly below standard, the products fall off the market yet finds value and circulation within micro-economies. Items are displayed on the ground, on cars, hanging of hoods and doors, laid-out across tables there is clearly no proper practice in this domain. In the cosmos, a utopian space, a mother pushes a cart down the aisle. Her two young children tag along at her sides as soft music chimes on the PA. The floor is shiny, freshly varnished and the rows of cleansing products sit perfectly aligned on the surrounding shelves. They are all identical, quality assured, standardised goods. She picks up a bottle of face wash – the label reads “four pounds” – and walks to pay at the checkout where a boy uniform greets her. It is an ideal scenario and image of the buyer, product and seller, where a space is artificially created. A cloud bursts and Lilla is in the car boot surrounded by people and action. The scene overflows with all other activity. It is a space that allows for difference where people are caught in free-play – inventing and redrawing the lines of practice. Grazing past the tables Lilla captures moments with her eyes. A Turkish man stands amongst tubs full of shoes. Some hanging from a pole, others piled in boxes organised arbitrarily by colour, size or brand/style. There is a smell of fake leather and the sound of rubber soles hitting each other as people rummage through the pile. A melange of colours, designs and sizes: sneakers, Kangaroos, flats, Crocus, boots, heels, Dr Martins; brown, black, white, red, beige; strings, straps, mesh lining, thread patterns. The shoes are obviously copies and factory surplus. Lilla sees a mirroring effect. An idyllic perception of quality shoes from the mall fall short. The market is guided by formal ideas of order, but discovers its own means of practice. The man carefully watches over his stall as people try on shoes. He yells: “Ten pounds any pair!” He picks up a shoe offers it to a woman, suggesting the colour and style. Lilla sees the people in action producing a space through social relation. The space of the car boot is created by all the identities from the market, producing a particular affect in a mode of collective production.

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Play of forces Lilla comes across a table with an African man selling laptops, mobile phones and video-games. She remembers seeing on TV that Africa’s cellphone industry is booming. Despite the poverty, Multinational Telecommunication Corporations are pushing mobile phone-banking in attempt to bring the country ‘up-to-speed’. In the market, juxtaposed in context amongst a world of other things, objects and people acquire new meaning through proximity and interconnected relations. The process of the self-organised game opens up the possibility to recast these epic mythologies. Lilla closes her eyes and absorbs the sounds from the crowd. The rustling of bags, clatter of objects, the sound of a fuzzy radio. Voices, expressing tones of inquiry, negotiation, conversation rise into a symphony of noises. A medley of languages and tongues of families and communities from Bengali, Polish, Turkish, Mandarin, to Hindi. The sounds of the market, the temporary fleeting collisions has a resonating affect of something beginning to form. Margin to margin, people intersect producing new meaning and understanding. Side by side, the space is shared and created, interweaving together disparate realities. In cordial play in a collective game, boundaries between territories are re-drawn.

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... a coincidence of perspectives, interpretations, engagements, and practices that enable different residents in different positions to either incrementally or radically, converge and/or diverge from one another and, in the process of doing so, remake what is considered possible to do.3 – Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer In an unregulated space, people and objects excluded from a formal order pluralise while possibilities multiply. Unexpected convergence and encounter between disparate actors opens up possibilities for renewed order. Play becomes a mode of practice in the production of a shared space. It allows for the free-improvisation and bending and re-creation of the rules. It is a live collective production, where new subjectivities are created. It is free and open to possibilities of reforming the structure of the game. Lilla slips out of the market and disappears around the corner. She never stands still as she enters and exits spaces of the city. Her actions follow her, but they are never pinned down. Like the car boot, shifting with different people, goods and relations that create a provisional space. Her embodiment in an automatic mode of production, she generates her own meaning as she engages with the world. The car boot is an appropriated space produced by a multitude of cultural identities. In a globalised economy, it generates intricate networks of power through the diverse streams that converge in the market. Modes of play within an imagined space offers possibilities negate and ultimately effect dominant global myths and narrative.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

What would it take for informal economies, those which operate under an improvised architecture based on the variables of social exchange, to feel less vulnerable and more empowered, for a mass to become a critical mass? In 2006 counterfeit DVD sellers in El Salvador took to the streets in protest against new copyright laws that threatened their trade. After their recent legal trial in Sweden, the defeated founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB), a major file-sharing website, assured users that they wouldn’t shut down the site and that file-sharing would carry on undeterred; a defiant self-declaration of normalising attitudes towards file-sharing. Both these actions suggest that the insecurity of the informal market is not entirely the struggle it is imagined to be – deadening people’s ideals, cancelling any trust in betterment through political change – albeit accessing equally extra-legal methods to bring this change about .1 In this way DVD and literature piracy in China is partly political; it has grown into a highly developed industry countering the effects of state censorship to give access to such films as Memoirs of a Geisha and a book entitled A Survey of Chinese Peasants documenting the plight of contemporary Chinese farmers, which became a bestseller, the authors losing out on royalties for eight million copies. These examples from abroad demonstrate a moving away from the short-termism of the informal, whereas Ian, a London street market ‘Guvna’ thinks it’s all shit, or scheiße as he says the Germans say it. Ian’s banking on arms investment: “It’s the only guaranteed return you’ve got!” Ian’s knowledge of his market is thorough; he can tell you about the tribal divisions between the Somali restauranteurs, that the Afghans selling lingerie don’t know anything about lingerie and that discipline and politeness are the Chubbs to a happy life. He also knows about the polycentric rings of Asian businessmen extending from Britain to the Subcontinent, their self-regulated business unaffected by and invisible to surveillance and international security protocol.2 Within these networks members are able to undercut competitors by pooling resources and sharing information; Ian isn’t giving up his membership of the Masonic Lodge. His history with the market extends from his first job as a tea boy through to security, when the market still had a patrol, through to his current tenure as market manager. Although doubtful about the next five years, Ian knows he’s not going anywhere (he has his own parking spot),

Quote by P.K. Das in Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, New York: Verso, 2006. p. 78. Simone, AbdouMaliq, ‘Globalising Urban Economies’, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, p. 116.

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The Big Boss

Shama Khanna

Photographs courtesy NinaManandhar.com

The Market Dandy as Decoy

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Rancière, Jacques, ‘The Distribution of the Sensible’, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 7–42. Virno, Paolo, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, London: Semiotext(e), 2003. p.3. 7

Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, New York, Verso, 2006. p. 80. Steyerl, Hito, ‘Documentary Uncertainty’, www.magazines.documenta.de, A Prior, Gent, 2007. Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, London: Routlege, 1993. p. 36.

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market in a performative mise-en-scène where talk and diversion, verging on rowdiness is encouraged. Maybe the immediacy of our encounter presented for me an authentic experience I wanted to identify with, leaving me with an affect of longing to be swiftly addressed with the purchase of a new handbag. Artist Hito Steyerl talks about this affective economy which also exists in the claim to truth of documentary news:

but he’s not just making do either. He’s a personal trainer and security consultant, people know he’s reliable and he’s able to consolidate his assets. Like the Asians he knows about self-preservation, together with the arms trade that’s all you need to know. It seems everyone at the market has access to a sideline in something, or treats the market as the sideline to their activities elsewhere. Mohammed sits regent-like on a stool opposite his handbag stall, sunning himself and welcoming trusted customers. He talks about his next meeting of the Koinadugu, a Sierra Leonian network he organises (he takes time to spell the name for me whilst pausing instinctively to pose for pictures). He says he’s the Big Boss, with a publicity secretary to help him. The meetings are a chance to catch up and check that everybody is okay, if someone’s getting married or someone back home needs hospital treatment, we all chip in to help, he says. Mohammed isn’t at all curious about the pictures or why we’re talking to him and why we’re not buying his bags. He is despondent about his future at the market due to the credit crisis but his eyes light up when he talks of his upcoming trip to Sierra Leone. This idle talk of a market dandy feels like magic – a refrain, an escape, he seems like the least produced subject you’d ever met, especially in the sunshine. He appears not to work, or at least to compete or to cower to any higher authority, or Bigger Boss. He’s civil but that’s just a byproduct of his self-assuredness. But something’s amiss, a sense of a future for Mohammed past the jimble-jamble of the animated present. Writer Mike Davis discusses how the poor are actually wealthy but lack the means to access their wealth. Possibly it is a result of the rental system, for Mohammed’s stall and his flat, which punctures the myth of upward mobility within the informal, ensuring that he will never have any liquid assets to enlarge the dangerous appeal of his refrain.3 I felt the danger of hyping up Mohammed’s situation too much, extolling his easy generosity and seeing the collaborative potential of the Koinadugu club scaled up to topple the ruthless individualistic pursuit of profit overseen by the Moguls of capital. Unregulated, there’s not a lot that differentiates the market from a feudal system open to exploitation, by mafia type operations on the one hand and multi-nationals on the other. Ethnic intolerance rumbles not too far from the surface of conversations and unemployment is a serious risk for a young person yet to establish him or herself: at this economic base level disenfranchisement from working life as well as family networks can lead, in the extreme, to the real pirate activities of the desperately poor Somalians driven to holding supertankers and merchant ships to ransom in the depths of the Indian Ocean. Perhaps Mohammed’s likeable aloofness was part of the selling patter of a virtuoso, amplifying the process of haggling which suspends the

Play of forces

The ubiquitous corporate news coverage which we endure on a daily basis sustains the illusion of control, while simultaneously demonstrating that we are reduced to the role of passive bystanders. While rehearsing attitudes of rational response, they transmit fear on a most basic, affective level.4 Mohammed’s cool in amongst the chaotic piles of clothes and shoes surrounding him; the disorganised charm of the market, could be nothing more than a decoy for capitalist intentions, but I believe this is a misinterpretation. The affective relationship set up here is positive, and not entirely monetary. Rather than the exchange being based on a perceived lack (our main insecurity advertisers depend on) the relationship is generative, a subjective becoming for both the seller and the consumer. Although this conception requires a significant paradigm shift in order to be more widely understood. From the periphery the straight-ahead logic of common sense and reason takes on a different slant. After a visit to the market you feel your sensual knowledge of people, sights and voices is expanded whereas the intellectual knowledge we are used to demanding is neglected. Writer Micheal Taussig discusses how since Hegel, “the beginnings of knowledge”, based on a Cartesian mind over body hierarchy, “were made to pass for actual knowing”.5 The logic of the market rather resists the accumulation of quantifiable knowledge which is not the currency here. What is produced is much more instinctively critical, an inter-intelligible response to both what is visible and what is sayable, the immanent politics of the market.6 Theorist Paolo Virno writes about the enunciative function of saying to configure spatial relationships: “In fact while language belongs to everybody and nobody, the passage from the pure and simple ability to say something to a particular and contingent utterance determines the space of an individual’s notion of ‘my own’.”7 On the street aleatory performance and spectacle busy the mind and body, the desire to consume transferred from the allusive language of advertising, the anonymity of a visit to the supermarket and even the passivity of the cinema hall, to the tactile market encounter, the play of partial knowledges, tacit deals and invention.

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Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Sister Envy

Play of forces

Roti Caravan

Just Looking

Linden’s Rat Tableau Vivant

Clothes Mountain

Independent Trader

Rude Dreamcatcher

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

Play of forces

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Art documentation is neither the making present of a past art event nor the promise of a coming artwork, but rather is the only possible form of reference to an artistic activity that cannot be represented in any other way…. One could also say that art becomes biopolitical, because it begins to use artistic means to produce and document life as a pure activity.9 At the market, the artificiality of our unconscious commodity fetishism is subtly acknowledged in the improvised exchange of the seller’s partial knowledge of the object in the lapsing cohesion of a situation in flux. This multi-layered interaction resists the processing of nothing more than a social encounter with props into a captured activity to be regulated and commodified by advertisers and tax collectors. Ethnographer Caroline Nordstrom, explains how we need a new terminology to gain a greater understanding of the “existential shock of the informal” acknowledging that access to multiple epistemologies reduces the risk of inequality and prejudice being perpetuated.10 Complicating traditional binary oppositions such as centre/periphery, civil/feral, truth/ untruth claims, confronts the critical separation between those included

Simone, AbdouMaliq, ‘The Visible and Invisible: Remaking Cities in Africa’, Under Siege, Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, Documenta 11, Platform 4: Exhibition Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2002, pp. 23–43. 12 Rogoff, Irit, ‘Smuggling – An Embodied Criticality’, 2006, www.eipcp.net. 13 Rancière, Jacques, ‘The Distribution of the Sensible’, The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 7–42.

Writer Boris Groys explains how Mohammed’s flâneur, who is radically unfixed and mobile, restores an aura to the copied object through “profane illumination”.8 Where the market is an index for the migratory patterns of populations it also reflects the deterritorialisation of the objects on sale. Without a sense of context they have no aura or authenticity. Groys describes how the flâneur generates a context for the objects based on a fictional cohesion, a storytelling, much like the presentation of documentary materials in an art installation or montage film such as Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik, 1993, or Steyerl’s Lovely Andrea, 2007, combining reportage, historical documentary, fictional quotations and sound, which Groys says also acts as a form of biopolitical appropriation by first acknowledging the basic inauthenticity of the artwork:

Trolley with Mango

Groys, Boris, ‘Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation’, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition 9 Ibid., p. 54. Catalogue, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz. 2002, p. 62. 10 Nordstrom, Carolyn, ‘War on the Front Lines’, Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius C.G.M. Robben (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 129–153.

Sharing a Picture

and excluded from the canon of history (hereby determined exclusively by a constituted teleology) from an altogether different vantage point. A new vocabulary constitutes an alternative logic where ‘ungovernable’ and ‘rowdy’ are read as positive attributes rather than validation for homeland security hysteria between an ‘us’ and a ‘them’. Writer AbdouMaliq Simone explicates how the established notion of ‘development’ which he defines as, “making ethical beings; about holding people in relations that make them governable” is an anathema to those who inhabit informal markets in African cities. He continues, “the sustainability of communities largely means sustaining ways of associating and moving which are not conducive to such citizenship”.11 He explains the need for a much greater selfrecognition and pride in this invisible mode in order to nurture and extend opportunities for informal collaboration. This can be imagined as a selfauthorised citizenship through a collective unfreedom, distancing itself from the capitalist precedent by underlining the critical obligation to the other in collaboration.12 Writer Jaques Rancière also asserts how: “This new terrain of production and life opens for labour a future of metamorphoses that subjective co-operation can and must control ethically, politically, and productively.”13 Such a mode of ‘production and life’ could result in a new culture of volunteerism helping to renumerate artists affected by file-sharing, calling upon an ethical relation as opposed to an alienating moral judgement condemning or condoning something for being either wrong or right. Rather, this approach makes the most of a polyphony of voices, leading to unexpected decision-making and a constant redefining of our relation to the past. This new paradigm where potentially the informal could begin to strengthen itself from within, entails a fracturing of the one-sided teleological narrative met with a radical openness to future outcomes resulting from collaboration. Looking back, it also necessitates a flexibility regarding history in terms of a changing historicity: the fiction making of a market flâneur which produces navigational effects in reality but is only ever sustained for as long as it is remembered as a story to tell.

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Trusting the Truth as a Fish out of Water Luisa Filippi

I did not know exactly why I was heading to Shepherd’s Bush Market. There are many other markets and even most of the shops have hats – Marks & Spencer included. But Mary, my course mate, said that there I could find a good range and excellent prices. Also, that suggestion on the Internet was tempting me. I had always been content with the fish bought in Tesco, but thinking about having the best fish in London just around the corner, or at least that was what was written on a website, was enough to awake the desire of a dinner with friends. I did not know what I could find in the market. Even now, after having been there several other times, it is difficult to remember the various shops and which are the best deals. May I have so little memory? Or simply can I not find myself in an organised chaos? The stall with the fish is in the middle. Reaching it is simple. I paused observing the different kinds of fish. I could have sworn that some of them were the same I used to buy next to my home, others had shapes completely unknown. My turn came and I asked pointing at a fish “Excuse me, how is this called?” “Where are you from?” “Italy, I am Italian.” Time to speak the first letters of my nationality and the fishmonger had already begun to smile, as a sign of defiance “This is merluccio! I’ve been in Italy, ‘bella Italia’! You call it ‘merluccio’, isn’t it?” “Oh, ‘merluzzo’, really? Good. Yes, almost, we call it ‘merluzzo’. And where do you catch it?” My mania for purchasing environmentally friendly food was surfacing there, as usual. I would never miss a good plate of fish but knowing the origin helps to clean the conscience. “From the Atlantic Ocean, this cod is fresh, just arrived this morning.” I watched the clock. It was only 8.30 am. “Really? This morning?” “Of course! It has been fished during the night and at 6 am it was already here. Don’t you believe me? Look at it, you may eat it fresh even now, or do some sushi.” Thinking of a Caribbean guy who speaks about sushi made me smile: “No no, I trust you, it’s just that I’m trying not to buy it because some people say that fish is dying out. I know that saying this to a seller sounds strange, but I’d rather try other kinds of fish.” “If cod were actually dying out, it would be difficult to find it and sell it and it would cost more, right?”. “Yes, but....” “If it cost more I wouldn’t buy it. And if we put a fish on sale that is dying out, this would affect all of

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Play of forces us fishmongers. Don’t you agree?” I wanted to argue that sometimes the rules of the market are not so clear, but a lady intervened: “Cod is the only kind of fish that my son eats, I can’t give up cod.” I felt like I was in Court of Justice where everyone was describing their relationship with the cod. I was obviously the inconvenient witness of the defence attorney of the cod. With a little of discomfort, I then asked him what else he had available. There was salmon, fresh tuna, mussels. And those two fish in the corner. Trout and mackerel. “Excellent, do they come from a breeding farm?” “If I tell you yes, do you buy them?” My face was clearly perplexed. He continued “I’m joking! However these [indicating the trout] are actually farmed, a friend raises them, in Kent. But the mackerel is caught. It is never breaded.” “Excellent, so it is not thawed out.” With a slight movement of the head, he confirmed. He seemed sincere enough to decide to trust him and take some trout and some mackerel. “Do you already know how to cook it or do you need advice?” In fact I still had not thought about it. Summer was coming and evenings were still too cold, so I started to think that I could make a Mediterranean sauce. Fish is part of my food culture so that I almost assumed I knew the best way to cook it. In a moment memories of home came to my mind, with Mum serving baked fish and memories of holidays with friends that roast trout on the barbecue. In London I had neither one nor the other ready to cook for me. And not even a barbecue or a good oven. “If I could have some advice it would be great.” “For the trout don’t worry, you can cook it in a pan with a little bit of herbs, it’s not like barbecue but it is still tasty.” “And the mackerel?” “You can cook it with the piri piri sauce, preferably in the oven, the slower the cooking, the tastier. Delightful.” I remember the satisfaction with which I left him. It was the same satisfaction of those who buy in the same place for years, believing that they have bought the best for themselves, for the environment, for their guests. I had the feeling of having made the right choice and I knew I would be back again. I then headed for the hats seller. The Indian man, with a long and well kept beard, was the furthest thing from a British seller of hats that I would have ever expected. Actually, first of all, I would have never thought of buying an English hat, one of those hats that British ladies wear to watch those sports unknown outside of England. Bizarre, large, crooked, with feathers, British hats had always been in my imagination something that is used in movies to describe English people and their traditions. I had never thought of having to be a bridesmaid and to be asked to buy my own hat. This seller was in a central area of the street and he was selling hats of all types: casual, for sports and ceremony. My fear was that the hats would be of low quality and that someone could notice it. I am not an expert and therefore I had to rely on the Indian seller to buy something suitable. I stopped to observe the items for a while, undecided whether to ask or not

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Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony for more information. Some colours predominated, such as blue, black and beige. Just as some shapes. Some seemed small decorated coconuts with feathers, others were so large that they seemed nests for migratory birds. There were no written prices. I do not like to have to ask for prices. The only thing that related these purchases to those in Italy was just having to confer, for the price, to the seller. In England, clerks are extremely discreet and allow you to watch things without interfering. Faced with hats instead I was forced to discuss with the Indian man about quality, features and, of course, prices. “Hello.” “Hello, how are you?” “Well, thanks! I have to kindly ask some information, because I’ve never bought a hat and I don’t know how to start.” “With pleasure, what kind of hat you need?” “A summer hat, for a ceremony.” At least talking this way I had begun to narrow down the search. I was thinking about the fish and how confident I was then. Here instead, I was feeling as a fish, a fish out of water. “May I ask how much it is?” “It depends, prices can vary a lot.” Not only the price was missing but he was also circumventing the questions. And I, indicating at an example of medium size, of a material like straw with black decorations: “This?” “That is 65 pounds.” “So this is the same?” “No, this one costs more. The amount of work is greater and the company from which I buy it sells them at a greater cost.” “Ah, and where is the company? I imagine that a lot of work is necessary to prepare them, are there still British craftsmen willing to do it?” “Yes, all the hats you see here are made in England.” My face must have been amazed. Everybody assumes now that certain products are created where labour is cheaper. “These, I buy them in Manchester, these in Leeds.” I looked at them and did not understand the difference. “Try this.” I looked in the mirror trying to understand what makes these gadgets so indispensable for a wedding. “Can I try another?” “Yes.” And so I went ahead trying to figure out which one, between so many colours and shapes, fitted me better without being too showy. Sometimes I watched them more closely to understand their features. I thought they were well made but I was not sure. “How could you continue to sell British hats even with the Chinese competition?” “Chinese can’t do anything if you have the best products.” This phrase impressed me for sure, but then he continued. “It is simple to distinguish their products, they are not well made. I have to build a relationship of trust with those who buy but also with the producers who sell me, only in this way I can buy at a good price.” “There are lots of people who buy these hats?” “Some people buy two or three a year but then advertise them to friends, sometimes they return for different hats, such as winter ones.” I smiled, thinking about myself and that if it were for me they would all fail. I had never used hats in my life, why should the others buy so many? “I am undecided between these two.” “How will the dress be?” “Black with

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Play of forces beige flowers.” “Then you should go for this, the measure is right and it has a very nice decor.” The decorations did not convince me, were they not too exaggerated? “But is it not too garish?” “No, no, no, you never saw the British? We like bizarre items! If you want to be like them that one is exactly suitable for a wedding.” While talking to me, he was fixing my eyes. I do not know whether this was due to his character or if he wanted to capture my attention to convince me to buy a hat. What was to be only a first visit to the shops, had been transformed into a purchase. And so I did. I took the bizarre hat, suitable for a simple dress. The wedding day arrived and I wore that hat. In addition to the inconvenience of not being able to move my head without risk, my discomfort grew as people started to look at the maids. What about their hats? They seemed to be the same as mine but perhaps I did not notice those details that they would have noticed. At some point during the lunch, one of the other five maids began to complain about the cost of the maid clothes. I remained quiet even if I agreed fully the inconvenience. She also said that she had been forced to buy the infamous hat in a market to save money. Good quality of course, good enough that she did not understand the choice of the other maids to spend so much on an item. My discomfort grew immediately. I began to observe the other hats and imagined crowds of relatives of the bride gossiping about my hat, as if it were clearly Chinese. Should I have trusted the Indian seller? Were they honest in telling me “you are beautiful today” or were they thinking the opposite, and that that was the kind of hat that a stranger pays too much for? Even today, I still smile thinking about my embarrassment, but also about my rash purchase. Usually I choose with calm: the Indian seller convinced me that I had found exactly what I was looking for, while actually I still was not clear in my mind on what to look for.

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Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

We are Shadows Caroline Stevenson

Brick Lane’s street market produces a vivacious soundscape. Every Sunday, the air is charged with an aural layering, produced through the interaction of buying selling and exchange. This sound is embedded with its own form of spatialtemporal order, navigating through the social space of the market and amplifying otherwise hidden narratives. Furthermore, it is in constant dialogue with the ominous presence of urban development and also the social histories of Brick Lane, as transient communities have, for centuries, passed through, leaving indelible symbols and marks of their efforts to live and thrive here, which have also inevitably shaped the outside street market. The following is a sonic tour through Brick Lane Market. It weaves through the space using sound as an indicator of the specific interactivity being played out here and proposes a form of direction and orientation through the market. While navigating particular calls for dispersal, assembly and spatial order, the informalities of the street market come into play, where production and power is less regulated from above and more determined by the social interaction from below.

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Point 1: Enter into the market at the top of Brick Lane, via the bagel shops and the first vendor selling used mobile phones. Entering the market, the low hum of hundreds of voices congregating and conversing emerges into a cloud above the street. Uncontained, the sound permeates the local area so that everyone moving, living and working along its streets are automatically involved in the market event.

Play of forces behind tarpaulin walls suggest that you might have your mobile phone unlocked here as well, for an undisclosed price. One man takes a phone from a customer and hands it to his partner who in turn quickly rifles through the pile of leads and expertly manoeuvres between two laptops. The men’s actions are drowned in the sound of the generator that keeps their laptops running, and also keeps them isolated from the rest of the market. Past the mobile phone stall, Bhangra music plays loudly from a stereo system in front of you, marking the territory of man selling bed linen. It opens up the intersection, delivering a massive antiphon between the band and the dancing crowd. This call and response dialogue mimics the market, separating the buyers and the sellers into an ongoing performance of exchange. Acted out in a marginalised space by everyday actors, the rules of the performance emerge through the interaction. Punjabi munda pao Bhangra’ (Boys from the Punjab dance Bhangra)

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The music fills the space, demanding your full attention, even if the bed linen being sold is not particularly interesting. It is punctuated on your right by a ‘fruit and veg’ vendor. He calls out in a thick cockney accent: Any bowl you like one pound. Aahh-ny bowl one pound. Aahh-ny bowl one pound Pound a bowl a pound Pound a bowl a pound Any old bowl a pound Poundabowlpoundabowlpoundabowl! Aah-ny bowl one pound Aah-ny bowl one pound Anybowlonepound Turning around, the man meets your eyes, poised with a bag in his hands.

As you move forwards, a specific topology of sonic symbols gradually begins to appear within the hum. Both human and non-human, they guide you through the space, indicating where to go. They are symbols of dialogue, desire, power and exchange and also of possibilities, imagined locations or places of belonging. Keep walking into the thick of the market. Point 2: Intersection of Brick Lane, Sclater Street and Cheshire Street. The market intersects here. Two men under a tarpaulin are selling used mobile phones. A pattern of activity between a pile of leads on the ground and two laptops

Anybowlonepound You don’t want any, so you quickly avert your eyes and keep walking. Point 3: Turn down Sclater Street and walk until the market opens up, taking over two otherwise car and lorry parks opposite each other. Another sound system here extends rolling Ragga drumbeats out into the crowd, creating a different rhythm in the market. The poor speaker quality produces a deep bass rumble and renders the lyrics inaudible. The noise draws you over.

Markets Tales â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A Geopolyphony

Play of forces

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony Two dreadlocked men are pulling jeans out of boxes at the corner of the car park. Without a table, they pile the jeans onto the dirty ground: an impromptu market stall. People begin congregating and handing over money to one of the men and receiving their jeans in turn. The other man starts shouting:

Any bowl you like one pound. Any bowl one pound.

All cheap today, have a look, have a look Havealookhavealookhavealook

Point 4: Turn back along Sclater Street, back to the intersection and, this time, follow Cheshire Street to the end.

Come on ladies and gents, it’s all cheap today, come and have a look Have a look, come and have a look Have a look All cheap today Come and have a look

Keep walking until you hear the sound of another generator. A vendor is selling coffee from a van, one of the more recent additions to the market. The coffee and cappuccino van mirrors the shops that have set up over the last few years full of expensive trinkets: jewellery, household objects, etc.. Small bells attached to the doors create a staccato effect of rings, guiding you along the road.

Turn around here to a commotion on your right. Three men are standing around a bike. A dog starts barking.

The generator powering the coffee van momentarily drowns out any other sounds of the market. Emerging at the other side, three people man a table covered in CDs and DVDs. A large speaker is playing a jukebox of all time greatest British pub anthems. The woman turns this one up:

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Aw right, aw right, aw right, aw right Awww Right. So eeeeager. Don’t mess us about then man Forget it man You take too long! It’s a transaction of sorts: two of the men depart with the bike and the man with the dog is left swearing to himself. He turns around, shouting that he’s been robbed. His dog barks and people begin to move away, parting around him so as to avoid the hostility of the dog and the man’s eyes, wanting so badly for someone to engage in his anger. Walk through the car park and the hum of conversation dampens a little. Apart from someone selling more bikes out of the back of a van, no one is shouting out what they are selling. The ongoing jumble of exchange and dialogue is as confusing as the makeshift stalls butted up against each other with objects spilling out and interfering with each other. Piles of car/cigarette lighter chargers on the ground next to second-hand shoes. ‘Antiques’ that amount to old plates your grandmother used to use and pirated DVDs. You’re not sure who’s buying and who’s selling here. Back along Sclater Street, the market ends as it begins, with tables lined with bowls of fruit and vegetables. The cockney sellers interject the soundscape of people and traffic:

Return to Brick Lane. On your way back, the men with the jeans have gone.

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… So I called up the captain Please bring me my wine He said ‘we haven’t had that spirit here since 1969’ And still those voices are calling from far away, Wake you up in the middle of the night Just to hear them say Welcome to the hotel California Such a lovely place Such a lovely face They livin’ it up at the hotel California What a nice surprise, bring your alibis…. ‘Hotel California’ creates a strange ambience, as it tries to pull the thinning crowd into a shared moment of collective nostalgia. On the other hand, it reaches out to the nearby Carpenter’s Arms and another dialogue emerges uncovering the more violent clashes of the East End in recent history with images of the Kray twins and their gangland, boxing and territorial wars. Point 5: Go back along Cheshire Street and turn right to continue along Brick Lane. Pass under the temporary bridge. The East London Railway expansion project has meant building works and a temporary walkway cutting through Brick Lane. These ongoing signs of

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony regeneration act to compress the space into a sense of order and forgetting: The East London Railway and the fact that Magic Cote has recently been applied to the street to eradicate symbols left behind, such as old chewing gum and footprints, ‘muck’, or the remnants of its social activity. Even the distant sounds of building works stress the landscape, like the warning signs of imposed order. Through the walkway a different crowd gathers to sell things: namely art and fashion students. Unlike the vendors on the other side of the bridge, they sit silently in front of their possessions, passing them off as ‘second-hand’. Although, secondhand has a different meaning here than it does back at the car park. The students sit like models posing against the famous Brick Lane, graffitied walls. Their aura of coolness assures you that you are buying a piece of nostalgia along with your two-pound sparkly bustier. This is a through-way where people access the market and move through to the trendier parts of the area. The sound of constant dialogue envelops you. Here it is okay to browse and take your time; there is no call and response like on the other side of the walkway that keeps you walking and deciding quickly what to do and what not to do.

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An old blue van sits in the corner and you notice a white-haired, denim-clad man sitting on a drum. He strums a guitar through an amp, and slides a bottleneck onto his finger. The sound of the guitar cuts through the space and the man’s Southern American twang enters the space through a microphone. Everyone turns to look and people begin to gather. We’re goin to get that suffrin’ tooon any time now. Lookathat. Lookathat. Ooohkay Right! We got action…. Action! Action! Ha ha! This song’s ’bout my third wife. Good lookin’ woman. Everybody thought she was an accident from the other side of the track. But in reality she had been livin’ on a mattress flat out on her back. ‘I said Elvira Elvira. I’m getting tired of you I said Elvira Elviiiiira. I’m getting so tired of you….’

Play of forces The market becomes a state of play, full of performers in fancy dress. Suddenly you are transported to the American Deep South, but at the same time into an allegory of travellers and life in the undercurrents of society, akin to the contents of the marketplace: objects and people alike, they seem to be travelling along, unravelling narratives, coming together on this Sunday morning only to be displaced hours later. Point 6: Along ‘Curry Mile’ to Jamme Masjid Mosque Curry Mile is dotted with neon and inviting smells. Walking through, it is impossible to ignore the calls for your attention from each of the curry houses. Starting with ten per cent off, the offers get better the more attention that you give. The dialogue propels you down the street. Stop here for a minute. Look up at your right at the Jamme Masjid Mosque. It reveals the histories of the street in one symbol of change and continuity. Previously a Protestant Church for Huguenots, a Methodist Chapel and a Jewish Synagogue, it now calls the local Muslim community to worship.

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A famous sundial decorates the wall engraved with the words ‘Umbra Sumus’ or “We are shadows”. Everything points to the impermanence of the area. The living and thriving space produced by migrant communities and the footsteps of millions of visitors are reduced to shadows that permeate the new with the old. It is a timeless junction where waves of actors and audiences have played out their own forms of interactivity in the name of survival, production and exchange. Although Brick Lane’s visual remnants are depleting, and regeneration threatens complete amnesia, bar a proposed museum in which to transport and preserve all of these relics, the space of the market and its call and response to the surrounding architecture is a persevering current. It is a space that is constantly forming and re-forming. As you leave the market, take these images with you. In a few hours, it will be over, the actors gone home. In its silence, detritus will remain: mostly cardboard boxes, paper and damaged fruit left behind for the evening street sweepers.

Markets Tales – A Geopolyphony

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ÂŠ the Authors. All rights reserved. Designed by Matthew Pull. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrival system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the authors. http://geopolyphonies.wordpress.com/ Acknowledgements The authors wish to express thanks to Irit Rogoff and Simon Harvey, for their continuing support throughout the project, and to the Visual Cultures Department, Goldsmiths College, forÂ providing financial backing for this publication. Special thanks must also go to Ashley Whitfield, Joanne Dodd and Tuula Juvonen-Rasen.