Smelling Like a Market

Abstract

I REMEMBER SOME MARKETS AS WORLDLY CELEBRATIONS of labor and sociality, their busy exchanges and careful presentation of goods and crafts a feast of abundance, colors, and smells. One of my favorite markets in the United States is Philadelphia's Italian market, which combines the buzz of a major city with the intimate feel of certain regional markets in Latin America, where goods have to do with local production and uses. Of course, there are also less appealing markets, like some in the barrios of Latin American cities, where no effort can dispel a sense of disorder and lack, the stink of abjection. In some markets, one can "smell" fear: one has to be careful not to be robbed by either the vendors or the clients. Others communicate calm, like my local farmer's market, a place for socializing and shopping in an atmosphere of cordial and safe exchange. There are also markets, alien to me, like the New York Stock Exchange, defined by the high-energy movements of betting on the shifting risks of corporate values, transacted in anonymous exchanges. The chain supermarket where I shop, homogenizing and impersonal, also qualifies as a market, as do the West's new temples, the malls, those commodity shrines whose excess, social control, and rarefied air so quickly disorient my senses. The markets of socialist Cuba have an estranging atmosphere all their own, one that smells of desires and social divisions defined by the boundaries of the dollar's circulation. While ordinary stores carry but a limited array of inexpensive local goods sold for Cuban pesos, new supermarkets and malls offer diverse imported goods at inflated state-set prices for U.S. dollars. Markets not only have smells, they are also apparently able to smell. Advocates of the capitalist market tell us that it can smell a successful product, a crisis, or a consumer need. For those who imagine it as an invisible hand that turns selfish individual choices into harmonious collective ends, the market seems to operate as a hidden nervous system: it senses people's desires, monitors their private decisions, and directs their conduct toward the production and consumption of goods that satisfy ever more differentiated needs. For its critics, the capitalist market is an all-too-earthly invention, rather than a benevolent transcendent force, blind to human needs and aimlessly propelled by the short-sighted pursuit of filthy money. Clearly, markets vary immensely in their purposes, organization, state relations, and social norms. Given not only its widely varying historical forms and attributes but also the divergent theories directed at explaining it, is there such a thing as smelling like a market?