bazaarm

ar

ke

t

kaUSHIk BHaUmIk

keYwordingkeYwording is a project by madhusree Dutta and Ines Schaber.

Until the late 80s, the arsenal, in whose context this project takes place, had used keywords as a search criterion for films in their collection. This practice was later abandoned because ‘the standard categorisations used to sort films and make them accessible in a popular form would exclude many films as the given categories do not and cannot be applied to many of the experimental films that Arsenal collects.’

Retrospectively though, the terms can be read not as a normative function within an archive but as a positioning of an organisation and its political agenda. The current project is to address, yet again, the space that lies between the possibilities of opening and locking of themes and practices when anchored on keywords. Keeping the Arsenal archive as the immediate context, instead of avoiding the pitfalls of applying words on films we attempt to pluck a few words from the contemporary cultural practices to rethink the ways of archiving and the struggle to keep contemporising that what is archived.

kaUSHIk BHaUmIk is a film historian and film curator based in Delhi.maDHUSree DUtta is a filmmaker and curator based in Bombay. IneS ScHaBer is an artist and writer based in Berlin.

keYwording is part of Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice. The idea of the Living Archive is to initiate projects that carry out archival work as part of their development, so as to link research, preservation and publication in the context of contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. Living Archive represents the attempt to undertake archival work that does not serve self-preservation only but is contemporary, creates something new and enables new approaches.

isbn 978-3-944692-02-9

1

The essay examines the bazaar as a practice through which the historical unconscious comes to terms with what is perceived as excessive in nature’s productiv-ity. It posits abundance and plenitude as an intellectual problematic that human societies have had to resolve over time, a problematic that has gotten obscured in contemporary economic and historical thought that has on the whole theorized the subject around the idea of lack, life around the idea of time and aesthetics around practices of iconicity. Such is the ideation underlying the idea of the market. Bazaars on the other hand work around experience of flow, action and aniconicity. A sub-plot examines the birth of the cinema in the bazaar and the various traditions of cinema that have arisen from its functioning in different kinds of bazaar cultures.

Demography is all. Ships and camels travelling across the in-

accessible parts of the world had for centuries brought in the

wares of the world and deposited them in what we call bazaars.

Where the hinterland of such entrepôts were rich in agrarian and

forest life bazaars continued into modernity; where they abutted

regions low on resources of life, war and competition gave rise to

modernity and markets replaced bazaars. What was a universal

paradisiacal way of life that allowed many cultures to converge

in singular spaces and bring to these spaces the produce of the

earth and imagination gradually retreated into the ‘backward’

zones of history. the bazaar itself became a marker of cultural

backwardness against the bureaucratic rigidity of the modern

market, its florid ways being deemed ornamental and decadent

as compared to the steely minimalist lines of the market. As

agrarian land disappears into the maws of the prison-house of

modern cities, corralling populations considered dangerous to

each other, the bazaar too stands on the edge of apocalypse.

We are reminded of the strange ending to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (that fount of Spinozism before Spinoza) in the

heavenly order of the Abbey of Thélème contrasting with the wild

disorder of the lives of the giants the book deals with – to the Gar-

gantuan world of bazaars the cities of today ruled by law and or-

der are the Abbey of Thélème of history. So absurd and unlivable

is life in the abbey as described by rabelais that we would be

forgiven for reading in this droll epilogue a tongue-in-cheek hint

that such order will soon give way to a wild and organic break-

ing away from and a civilizational cycle will bring back to us the

worlds of Gargantua. thus the bazaar does not so much face

decimation as many a nostalgic romantic liberal would have us

believe as stand on the edge of history, within a turnstile historic

moment that creates maximum tension between the two things

- bazaar and market.

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At conflict here are two kinds of timecodes to life, rather

than two economic models. At the heart of the modern market

is the nuclear middle class family home with its budgeted lives

of orderly consumption that are provided for in an equally or-

derly manner by the market; the conveyor belt of the factory line

passes between home and market. The bazaar on the other

hand has at its heart the world itself, its miraculously wild pro-

ductivity that is the cause for both frustration and marvel in the

heart of its inhabitants. Hence, the Indian bazaars, for exam-

ple, have been home to the composition of erotic poetry that

compares the voluptuous efflorescence of young bodies in the

same breath as they celebrate the clouds becoming engorged

with humid tumescence in the monsoon or the burgeoning of

life in grain, flower or plant. Things are out of control and wild,

frustrating, but they are also magnificent to observe as they

bloom to the limits of their organic physical potential. Therefore

there is also a tolerance for the ill-formed, the misshapen, the

grotesque, since nature is remarkably fickle in the distribution of

the properties of life amongst organic things. The market is de-

fined by an exclusion of such things, banishing the ‘imperfect’ to

garbage or cabinets of teratological wonder. As a contemporary

anthropologist in India commented quite astutely, conditions

like ageing and dementia are not empirical medical categories

amongst Indians, being seen instead as distinct conditions of

being, autonomous in their properties and expressive ways.

Even today, many Indians believe that the terrible forms of life

are ways of divinity testing the devotion of the devotee rather

than criminal or deviant behavior. In contrast, in Russia we had

the market and the patriarchal church and the terrible form of

Dostoevsky mediating the two but interpreted in secular ways

as a modern existentialist, a nihilist or a mad man. The market

drives the ‘imperfect’ into either the marginal configurations of

secret cultic behavior or ‘deviant’ lifestyle practices or into the

centrality of personal love, as that great revisionist text of the

French Revolution, Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,

was to signal. The text’s mythic qualities rose through the nine-

teenth century as Baron Haussmann rewrote Paris into markets

and the grid-lines of modern urban planning, driving the terrible

further away from public consciousness. Such compartmentali-

zations were unthinkable in a bazaar until recently, there being

a communal flavor to the acceptance and care of the terrible.

Europe for a few centuries went universal when the pleni-

tude of colonial ventures forced the bazaars into its midst, the

grand guignol of the insurgence of life and politics that we read

arising from the bazaars in ancient Indic, chinese or Japanese

texts seems to have found home in a world that on the whole

had struggled to get its material worlds together in hostile geo-

graphical and climatic conditions. The rise of the Nazis at the

end of a whole suite of historical movements arising from the

bazaar-like conditions of European cities seem to mark an end

to the brief incursion that the bazaar seems to have made into

European history. It was as if the terrible, sequestered from the

central drives of European history, emerged once and for all in

a spectacular and gigantic scale as a reaction to historical ex-

clusion to put an end to a certain relationship between human

growth, history and settlement. There is a sequence in the Ta-

viani Brothers’ the nights of San Lorenzo, where fully-armored

soldiers spring from the soil amidst stalks of grain that reminds

us that Europe makes up for its relative lack of organic diver-

sity with production in large quantities of fabricated objects, the

54

artisanal over time giving way to the industrial, and one of the

artisanal objects created in this absolute material lack is the

soldier, the drilled soldier tending towards the robotic. there is

in the end running through European history the motif of the de-

fence of foundationally meager organic resources through the

use of weaponry and urban settlement (of which the grid-lines

of property relations is a subset) that makes the florid wildness

of a bazaar a difficult proposition. (However, the European mili-

tary logic is a middlebrow Romantic imagination in a middle-

brow material culture. Where absolute hunger reigns we find

the absolute discipline of the Chinese or Japanese military.

In real lack no one has the illusion of robots being capable of

solving the human issue of hunger.) It is not enough to get the

goods of the world into your entrepôts, for a bazaar to happen

in the proper sense the entrepôts must abut organic plenitude

in culturally continuous ways, the ways of plenitude that must

foundationally inform its own ways. Europe was alas too far

away from the centres of plenitude and bazaars on their edge,

only resonances of such things can be heard in its histories.

It was never a question of physical distance, it was always a

matter of cultural distance, something that can be measured by

the manner in which story cycles and their attendant religious

ethos circulating between the ends of eurasia fared between

europe and Japan. Between europe and India, intractable

mountain ranges and cold deserts and between Japan and In-

dia, the fertile flood plains and the tropical forests of East and

Southeast Asia. Europe-wards we see a conscious distancing

from earlier continuous flows of ideas and stories while Japan-

wards we see the carnival of life in organic plenitude allowing

stories to mutate into myriad versions, slightly changed over

thinly maintained lines of cultural difference between com-

munities contiguous with one another. Here there were none

of the majestic marches of Russia and Eastern Europe cre-

ated as a bulwark across immutable cultural difference. Stories

travel well westward from India as well but up to a point; Islam

starts off from arid zones and gets absorbed into the prosper-

ous societies of Africa and Asia abutting its fount of emergence

and develops the bazaar to its more glorious forms; European

involvement with the same zones ends up being marked by

colonial predation. The medium-range material basis of Euro-

pean life sustaining an illusion of permanent territorialization/

property making in one corner of the world against the forces of

history along with its geographic location with respect to africa

and Asia seems to be the key to understanding why bazaars

continue to flourish in certain parts of the world, whereas the

same transactions of life give rise to the market in the European

worlds.

This leads to the realization of one of the fundamental epis-

temic differences between market and bazaar cultures – the

fact that bazaar cultures are cultures of storytelling and market

cultures that of icon creation. In bazaar cultures matter evolves

around unstable intensities of emotional drives and forever dis-

solves into variants and versions that travel a long way through

diverse cultures. Icons are difficult to find here, matter does

not gather in substance nor sharp enough figuration to give an

autonomous identity to the image. Instead, matter is forever

flowing away towards the many detractors of icon formation,

too many heresies that are never heresies in the true sense

since they inevitably find communities of supporters and space

in the ‘mainstream’. As a venerable commentator of Indic text

and culture creation commented – there are only versions here,

never an original. Thus only a sea of stories told from various

76

points of view, and never a central perspective from which the

complexity of human history can be reeled back to a singular

narrative. One can from this perspective see the entire pro-

cess of the development of the novel in Europe as a process of

iconization, a process that proceeds precisely around the time

when folk story cycles and historical narratives are also being

centralized into standard forms at the expense of versions. The

standardization of folklore and history allowed the hero of the

novel to at once emerge as continuing the lines of heroism as

developed in standardized folk histories and it also allowed the

business of history to be settled once and for all as a matter

restricted to the past thus creating a present that the new hero

can dominate and indeed ‘improve’ on the heroism of the folk

of the past. The iconicity of the modern hero of the novel is pre-

cisely possible to the extent that the past and what are deemed

as remnants of the past – the folk – are iconized alongside.

Such a thing is not possible in bazaar cultures where history

is never a settled affair; versions of history are forever battling

it out, one reason why Indians are notoriously defensive about

family histories and the archival impulse. The mahabharata,

composed and consumed in the bazaar, is a tale of genealo-

gies and thus considered a cautionary inauspicious text. any

fact about genealogies and the past revealed to the public can

always turn disadvantageous in longstanding battles of histori-

cal versions raging in the bazaars.

Thus any impulse to icon formation is forever scuttled by

dissent. This mode of operation of bazaar cultures coincides

very substantially with Deleuze’s employment of Pierre Clas-

tres’ work on dissent in tribal societies, where an inherent anti-

statist impulse is at work within every working of such a society.

What follows is the proposition that an object in the bazaar is

always a cultural thing, something around which a story can be

spun, not an icon that can be measured for its physical proper-

ties and converted into an object of empirical enquiry, an object

of science. In Europe, cultural dissent had to be stamped out

for objects to be freed up to become measurable icons and

enter the realm of science, something that bazaar cultures do

not allow for. The medium through which the object was freed

up from cultural dissent, where the object was freed up from

subjective ownership in a political battle of many sides, was of

course the idea of the nation-state. And the fact that the nation-

state idea is weak in places where bazaar cultures flourish is

proof of how fundamentally transgressive the idea of central-

izing nation-state the bazaar is. Jihad is a universalizing princi-

ple of world domination arising from the equally comprehensive

representation of all the world in the bazaar, the nation-state is

too small an idea for the expanse of territorial imagination that

the bazaar encompasses. The absence of empirical philoso-

phy, a substantial scientific impulse and the nation-state ideal

in bazaar cultures need to be understood against a universe

of storytelling about the world and its objects that are always

involved in an elemental struggle for territorialization in a vast

expanse of cultural stimulus. Here stories are forever political,

sectarian yet world-encompassing. Here, icons are bound to de-

cay away when the realization dawns that no all-encompassing

territorialization in the universe of perceptions will be possible

for an individual being. Temples will be left unfinished; men and

women will renounce the world. Territoriality of the nation-state

that in the last instance always depends on the heroic iconic

stance of the last citizen standing against the forces of what the

nation-state excludes is too limited an iconic logic for bazaar cultures. It is as limited as the nation-state is circumscribed.

Here instead we have the sky-touching statuary of the kind

that we find in Shravanabelagola, an impulse that is repeated

in the monumental statuary of the untouchables of India as

well in the Buddhist statuary of Southeast asia and the statu-

ary of the Communists/East Asian totalitarians in China, Viet-

nam and Korea. The noise of history that the bazaar contains

can only be transcended in art, in imagination through statuary

that breaks through the noise of the world below and becomes

all smooth, silent and calmly all-encompassing in the sublime

aniconicity of the skies, the totality of organic fertility and cul-

tural noise summed up all at once in a negative.

It follows therefore that empires have always done well

as an idea in bazaar cultures, all bazaar empires claiming to

be the emperors of the four directions, or quarters. Like the

giant statuary of bazaar cultural heroes, empires of certain di-

mensions can be finite, yet infinite and aniconic conceptually,

merging into the organic matter of the universe. They can sub-

limate all the diversity of sensory experience that bazaars con-

tain at a certain point in time. Market-based empires are im-

possible humanly; they can resemble sci-fi empires, cyborgian,

but inhuman to that extent. Asiatic empires functioned through

rulers who in their bodies assumed the organic diversity

of the universes they ruled, a model of kingship called sacral

kingship by europeans precisely because of the rarity of the

occurrence of such kingship in european history. as studies

have shown high intensity organic definitions of the king’s body

as assuming the universe were gradually attenuated in Euro-

pean history to symbolic forms into icons. More than being sa-

cred Asiatic kingship was a form of pantheistic devotionalism

that was articulated in the extremely strong devotional cults

that formed the main framework of the social in the lands be-

tween West and East Asia. The strongest evidence of this

assumption of the organic plenitude of the universe is to be

found in the elaborate dietary and medical regimes that at-

tended the lives of Asiatic emperors – something that is

rarely found in european kingly histories. and it is of course

this very connect that made the emperor’s body a bazaar body of sorts.

read the tale of Genji carefully and one would realize

that kingly bodies were imagined as plants, flowers and

creepers, part of the universe of diverse matter of which that

body was supposed to be the supreme emanation. The im-

agination of the courtesans of the Yoshiwara district could

directly articulate in their songs and poems what made the

imperial prince’s body so glorious and so resplendently cos-

mic. Indeed, the women had direct rights to define such or-

ganic glories of imperial charisma. These days one sees on

the crossroads of Delhi women of nomadic castes defined by

the British as Criminal Castes and Tribes specializing in sing-

ing and dancing (as well as having the right to multiply marry

multiply) waiting in their dusty tattered clothes to get work with

construction labour chain gangs. Less than a hundred years

ago such women were capable through their artistic charms

of becoming queens of the numerous Princely States that dot-

ted colonial India. The harem – in keeping with empire as re-

pository of all of the universe’s resources – represented the

diversity of feminine beauty from all over the world entering the

royal portals through the bazaar. Whatever be the differences

in imperial styles between Asiatic empires certain things remain

common to them – their dependence on trade and their being

prone to being overwhelmed by nomadic invasions. Indic and

Islamic empires forever remained open to migrations from all

1110

over the world.

The number of narrative cycles in India about the monarch

functioning through his life in the bazaar is very large, as is

that of stories featuring Vishnu, the sustainer of the universe,

circulating in Western Indian bazaars, most probably those

of the port towns on the Indian Ocean. Nature, culture and

empire are therefore placed in a continuum, one impercepti-

bly merging with the other. And even if going eastwards and

westwards from India one sees the birth of modern bureau-

cratic empires in China and in the Islamic realms, institutions

that would culminate in the formation of the European nation-

states, bureaucratic records always consisted of monumental

collections of stories pertaining to empire and locality, tales

rising from the bazaars. The aim of bureaucracies collecting

such stories was to get a stereotypical idea of the ways of

peoples in regions and cities through the prism of which un-

derstanding they could be governed. Through these stories of-

ficials kept an eye out for sectarian fault lines running through

society that had huge political implications in bazaar empires.

In India, to drive home the relationship between a supernatu-

ral world signifying the wild ways of organic natural plenitude

to an extreme, bazaar stories of an esoteric kind were the

official history given the strong hold esoteric cults had on the

beliefs and lives of Indic monarchs. It is this connection be-

tween imperial body, cult, bazaar and the organic plenitude

of the universe that accounts for the bureaucracies of these

empires recording supernatural tales emanating from the ba-zaar as historical documents relevant for the smooth running

of imperial governance. Colonial archives too collected such

tales but as exotic ancillaries to the more dry empiricism of

the bureaucrat’s note. Rarely was colonial empire governed

through such tales.

Fall of empires began locally in bazaars. Local sectarian strife

in bazaars always had military and political implications which usu-

ally ended in the deposing or assassination of monarchs or no-

madic invasions that took advantage of chaos at the centre of the

universe to move in and take over power. Anti-imperial insurgency,

in all these bazaar empires, is seen as nature gone suddenly wild,

rather than as an abstract political event. Falls of empires were

cosmic disasters, a reaction to political negativity that in Europe

gets marginalized over time to the ‘loony fringe’. Apocalypse and

empire are rooted in the bazaar mediation of all the worldly goods

that gets shaken up when the political edifice ensuring the inflow of

goods is ruined. Bazaar empires are driven by trade above military

preoccupations precisely because the accumulation of the goods

of the world is central to imperial logics. There is no point in hav-

ing an empire if the goods of the world cannot flood the bazaar. Goods do not flow in for economic principles but for the simple

reason of the bazaar being created as a space where the bounty

and diversity of natural and human creation can be accumulated

and presented for delectation even if just for the pleasures of see-

ing things. Bazaars therefore mimic the epistemic principle under-

lying the famous tale of the Chinese emperor who would allow

scientific instruments and objects to be created only to order their

destruction once a public demonstration of the creation has hap-

pened. Scientific instruments that promised a population preoccu-

pied with studying and running them in geeky corners of focused

solitary labour was inimical to the principle of life lived actively in

the plenitude of nature and culture. and yet in allowing things to

be fabricated and demonstrated, even if only once, the emperor

was keeping the bazaar principle of life intact that all the marvels

of the world must find expression in the glory of imperial control of

12

the universe.

Insurgency and Apocalypse never render the foundational

principles of the bazaar inoperable abuts as it does organic

plenitude that replenishes itself despite all human violence ren-

dered. History never imagines violence ending the plenitude

of organic produce or the incessant sprouting of human bod-

ies through reproduction. nature goes wild in insurgency for

a while, there is widespread death and destruction and then

nature and human populace go back to their ways of reproduc-

ing themselves in large numbers. For this reason bazaar artisa-

nal labour always keeps metals below the intensity of iconicity,

below the machinic, thus rendering metal and machines hu-

mane incessantly . Inasmuch as material and organic plenitude

reduces the defensive edge of metal and machines in bazaar cultures there is a lyrical quality to life. However, territorial vio-

lence cutting across the fault lines of story versions and sectar-

ian difference is ruthless and brutal. as has been discussed

with tribal life in natural plenitude such life is simultaneously

forever paranoid and at home with the diversity of spirit worlds

that the emanations of organic diversity create around in the

psyche. Something of this marks the bazaar as well. Motivation

for actions is subtle and obscure passing through the virtual of

the myriad projections that the plenitude of the bazaar throws

up but so is the intensity of violence that takes in its sweep a

complex web of sensory reasons to destroy life around the self.

The narratives of deaths foretold by Latin American magic real-

ist writers are the stuff of what bazaar cultures are made up of.

The equation between grain sprouting that needs to be

hacked off and bodies to be hacked in vendetta remain inte-

gral to the sacrificial basis of life that underpins bazaar logics.

However organic plenitude ensures that an equation is always

maintained between the grandeurs of population growth and

the florid display of the universe in miniature that the bazaar resonates despite all the violence and loss of material and life

in fierce bouts of massacres and bloodletting. There is no ab-

solute horizon of lack that ever needs to be fulfilled through

the machine after Apocalypse has rendered a territory of life

absolutely dysfunctional irrevocably for history. Life always re-

mains connected to the organic softness of nature, the nature

of the earth washed by the monsoons of which the human rep-

resentative is the female sexual organ that is worshipped as

a thing-unto-itself in Asiatic bazaar cultures. It always remains

connected to the creeper, the very creeper seen clinging to the

leg of the Jain renunciant represented at Shravanabelagola.

And on the margins of all this there is the expansive world of

renunciants who opt out of the noise of the bazaar, the sectar-

ian violence it entails and futility of history that it enunciates

time and again. From this position are written treatises on the

condition of life, collated the stories of the bazaar and com-

posed the music of renunciation that then find its way back into

the bazaar to inform the folk. There is abstraction possible, but

always in the form of an icon bound to decay under the pres-

sure of nature’s wanton forces of growth. It would be foolhardy

to differentiate between the purely abstract texts on sense,

thought and perception in bazaar cultures from the cultic/iconic

affiliations of the authors of such texts.

In the end bazaar cultures have flourished in contexts of

people working very hard to bring to order the unpredictability of

nature’s florid fertility, people fabricating endlessly in response

to the huge and diverse quanta of sensory stimulus by com-

plex environments and market cultures and a lot of physical

action and conversation. Bazaars are rife with conversation

13

HATTERR

the Arabian Nights

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the Cultural RevolutionSociety Must Be Defended

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1716

and stories precisely because encounter with phenomenon is

an experience that cannot be reeled back into neatly packed

bundles of iconic stories. Instead people babble and stammer

in the sensory of excess of the encounter, multiple viewpoints

abound since no one really knows what they had experienced

and violence breaks out precisely in the excess of the sensory

of these encounters. The flipside is that such encounters create

a marvelous imagination and openness to the emanations of

matter and mind that the bazaar then sets up displays for. the

attempt to stamp out the unpredictable logics of the encoun-

ter with phenomena is precisely what defines a market shaped

by the commodity that neatly scrambles away the instability

of matter and mind through attractive packaging. Abstraction

away from life into dry theory is what would allow for this and

this is precisely what the bazaar would not allow where the ab-

straction of the senses in the shock of the encounter with phe-

nomena loops back into gossip, secret cults, conversations and

sectarian strife in the bazaar, into life itself. the trader and the

soldier bring back tales of their encounters with the vast and the

ineffable, experiences they have accumulated in journeys away

from the known world. Compare the open-endedness of such

tales with the methodological rigour of the epistemically equiva-

lent ethnographic narrative of Western academe. One suspects

bazaar cultures are, in the end, sustained by a realization that

phenomena cannot be reeled back into measurability or cogent

verbalization. There will always be something beyond the rep-

resentable, the space of war and renunciation, the space of

aniconicity. In such a scheme of imagination everything human

and accented in a point-of-view is merely one generation of the

human attempt to come to terms with the vastness of phenom-

ena, history a passage of one generation of such attempts to

another, each generation reflecting the efforts of the previous

one along successive planes of presence. Dance and song are

so vibrantly and so incessantly present in cultures sustaining

bazaars precisely because they celebrate the coursing of the

excess of phenomena in their bodies, the electric charge of ex-

perience that cannot be symbolically represented. And it is the

acceptance of this excess that allows things to accumulate end-

lessly in bazaars without being interrupted by the notion that

somehow the chaos of material productivity can be disciplined

into grids of order and theory.

This has profound implications for thought through the dif-

ferences of historical trajectories of bazaar and market cultures

foundational to which is the nature of organic and material life

between such cultures. Where nature is rampant bazaar cul-

tures flourish, where nature is middlebrow market cultures can

come to be in the illusion that phenomenon can be controlled,

made to listen to grammatical speech and society can be or-

ganized in an orderly way where the goods of life can be equi-

tably distributed through the rule of law. the latter is of course

an illusion, Western market societies could not have come into

being without the decimation of huge swathes of populations in

World Wars. The order in market societies is possible because

the messiness of nature and therefore of history has been re-

solved by the massacre of millions who are no longer there nor

reproducing on to mess things up. But there are a number of

historical details for the pre-modern period of history that also

need to be thrown up for further speculation. There came a

time in the history of Asia when the Buddhist revolution man-

aged to insinuate the monk-doctor-philosopher as the principle

mediator of epistemic thought into the two ends of the politi-

cal spectrum –the emperor and the soldiery. On the imperial

1918

side of things the Buddhists insinuate themselves into positions

of power through a cosmic theory of the body that translated

to medical/alchemical control of imperial health and the same

theory of the body translated to the development of martial arts

in the monasteries that drew in the countryside soldiery and

finally brought sectarian strife under a modicum of universal

consensus about the aims of life and history. Buddhism also

took over the medical upkeep of the populaces at large. Bud-

dhism, especially its Tantric, Chan/Zen variants, thus became

the mediators between bazaar popular cultures and imperial

life. In India, the same Buddhist Tantric cultural matrix would

provide the ground for the most viably sublime reconciliation

between Brahmanism and Islam, between empire and the peo-

ple, something that British colonial culture fails to achieve. A

continuum of bazaar ideologies unites emperor, the populace

and the soldiery through this revolution in social and political

thinking. Abstract philosophy in these cultures never loses con-

tact with the world of folk stories, supernatural tales and the

jester’s humour.

Such a condition of knowledge systems in bazaar worlds

needs to be understood if we consider the political system of

bazaar cultures as a midway phenomenon between tribal com-

munism in circumscribed eco-cultures and market cultures

commanded by centralized bureaucratic nation-states. It allows

the order of nature to run social and cultural terrains and al-

lows a universal access to the world in unregulated ways. It

is, in some ways, absolutely the middle path of possibilities of

political, social and economic organization. The emperor in

these systems or the so-called ‘corrupt’ politician of the Third

World remains a community Big Man of sorts. Power is medi-

ated through strong village political systems that participate in

historical shifts in dynasties and electoral fortunes. the role that

the Big Man in such a system plays is to lead the community

through the plenitude of organic and material life in as orderly a

manner as is possible. Access to the world’s goods is what the

Big Man is supposed to organize, a role that the emperor too

has to play at the summit of this organization of political power.

Military defence is circumstantial and not foundational as it is

in Western political systems. Instead, the foundation to political

power is the orchestration of life in the plenitude of natural and

material processes. The incredible productivity of bazaar socie-

ties both facilitates such an ideology as provides the ground to

be organized as a social and cultural problematic. Philosophy,

scientific and technical thought and stories all remain wedded

to the problematic of managing plenitude rather than try and

fulfill an absolute lack in materiality through offence and then

guard what has been accumulated through absolute defence.

The intensity, amplitude and frequency of labour and physical

activity in such cultures necessitated by the sheer fertility of or-

ganic phenomena disallow dry abstraction beyond a point; the

icon must crumble to the necessities of practical life, against the

excesses of phenomena, the two being one and the same. It is

this overarching tenor of life dedicated to the logic of managing

the problematic of plenitude that produce both the bazaar and

the Buddhist revolution of joining empire, populace and soldiery

within a unified field of ritual practice always connected to sto-

ries on the one hand and to practical tasks like harvesting and

martial arts on the other.

Compared to this, in the West knowledge retreats to Chris-

tian monastery, the connection between imperial life and such

knowledge systems being weak at best and frankly mostly hos-

tile. Equally hostile was the relationship between emperor and

2120

the people of his domain. Much of this hostility can be attributed

to the cutting-edge role played by the military class and sol-

diery in overcoming the physical challenges to making Europe

accessible and habitable, something that was not

necessary in the same intensities in Asia. The hubris of this

class translated into a militaristic vision of society that was

exclusive of all other conditions – bazaars, knowledge and

of the world in general. It is only with the advent of colonial-

ism that certain political revolutions became possible and

mediations of knowledge between people and the State be-

came regularized. And with that a certain bazaar econo-

my comes about for a couple of centuries, a phenomenon

that is also attendant upon the birth of cinema. However, one

may argue that the absolute lack in materiality at the heart of

Western culture that fails to sustain demographic expansion

ended eventually in the bloodbaths of the World Wars. It was

colonial competition to make up for material lack that ended in

the World Wars and it seems that the lack of organic presence

within organic plenitude cannot be made up by colonial preda-

tion. This might explain the Nazi fantasy to centralize colonial

predation within a single focus and thus centralize access to

the organic plenitude of the world; competition was a hindrance

in the way of such a thing coming about. The World Wars then

gave rise to the budgeted way of life as Europe retreated to

vastly abbreviated organic parameters of life, the logical out-

come of which was the market economy and all the atten-

dant abstractions in the field of science, politics and culture.

The commodity appears as the illusion of equitable distribution

of all matter of the world to citizens living budgeted lives; it also

appears as the promise of an irreversible packaging in all of

nature’s unruly ways, the phantoms of our primal fears of death

by annihilation by nature wished away in design. thus, the

markets of today masquerade as the possibility of a

bazaar at the heart of Western societies, the centralization of

produce and productivity of the world that colonialism had oc-

casioned for a brief while.

But, as we speak, globalization flattens the logic of

life and productivity in unprecedented scale across the world

and the bazaar-i-fication of the world looks imminent. Led in

the main through the twentieth century by the energies of cin-

ematic fantasies of love across cultural horizons, globaliza-

tion is a busy and frenetic response to global access to all the

world’s materials. Melodrama, that locking of horns of primal

goats producing heat and fire beyond the energy levels of an

eco-niche, constructed conflict to open up the inter-subjective

to plural possibilities of communication. As if fire was needed

to sear the skin of history to bring out the full glory of the id

desiring to connect with everything everywhere, to release the

heap of international human desire, vectors of action and do-

ing, in the Eros of cinema. Once the world has been opened up

by melodrama, hierarchies of value crumble under the assault

of unbridled fabrication and production of goods tapped out

to the throbbing rhythms of the desire to communicate across

difference. We see a return to small films, to stories all over.

Abstraction is down. Action cinema dominates the world’s en-

tertainments as younger generations adopt a more pro-active

and productive attitude to material experience cutting out first

melodrama and then abstraction. The practical basis of life is

taking over everywhere. Indeed, a true Deleuzian project wor-

thy of our times would be to tease out the philosophical bases

of action cinema, a subsumption of philosophy by non-philos-

ophy. meanwhile, the escalating noise of the global bazaar

2322

pushes people more than ever before into the spiritual domain

of renunciation.

The excess of encounters with phenomena that high mo-

dernity facilitated as the ground for life in the twentieth cen-

tury is now beginning to unfold in its true molecular logics, a

middle class one, powerless, puny in the face of taxation

and slave labor. Stories abound therefore, stories of sensory

confusion touching the spiritual…just about…no Visconti ma-

jestically summing history up from the powerful position of the

haute bourgeoisie. Derrida too was right about the sensory

excess in the encounter with phenomena, the ever-present

possibility of the spiritual in all forms of history. Traditions cre-

ate, as we see in contemporary art, the large scale object as

memorial to their own passage…all its workings being reeled

into a single Jeff koons object as it were. In between is the

world of managers: managers managing the rampant out-

pourings of creative expression by sensoria instigated by

world’s piquant stimuli as tradition breaks down. Managers

seek to steermanage the global bazaar into something that

is increasingly untenable as they seek to extract old-fash-

ioned value orders from a new order patently contradicting

market thought. And for these reasons, the bazaar, by its vir-

tue of being a median commonsensical acceptance of the

diversity of organic life and its unpredictable ways, a kind of

Buddhist Middle Path to history between excess and civilization,

between organic plenitude and land clearance, too remains a

perpetual possibility in history. If life and nature were allowed

to grow according to their free logics without the paranoia of

demographic circumscription and the illusion of absolute mate-

rial lack then the spectre of the bazaar is one that all political,

economic and philosophical thought will have to traverse at one

time or the other. To form markets out of the bazaars would

mean reinventing new forms of racism/sensory taboos to keep

the inevitable decay of icons at bay by keeping away the sun

and the rain of insurgent human desire from reaching into its

portals.

the bazaar was a manner of controlling the terror human-

ity faces when confronted with the overwhelming plenitude of

earth, huge heaps of produce that cannot be numbered or cod-

ed, heaps that threaten to tear open human ability to contain

experience (this heap is the aniconic shadow of the earth itself).

Then comes the heap of huge but manageable proportions (still

beyond codification) that immediately instigates greed, insur-

gency and civil war (this is the phase of iconicity – divinity, dra-

ma and revolution). They instigate the human mind to loot as

revenge for all the hardship that humanity has gone through in

the virtual in its struggle with nature. Finally, comes the bazaar with its heap of goods and produce of humane proportions (and

still beyond the code even if there is an illusion of the possibility

of code/measure due to modest proportions), an aniconic shad-

ow of the sacrifice where suffering in history is sublimated and

the vendetta against nature deferred (this is the phase of the

state, cinema, where nature’s bounty is returned to humanity in

an orderly fashion). Oriental bazaars therefore are built around

shrines to forefathers and martyrs to the cause of history as a

sign of regulation of this strife at the heart of the heap; no cen-

tralizing church can absorb the energies of heroism/vendetta

against nature in history that bazaar cultures are built upon. In

India, the caste order comes into being around such operations

in response to the heap, only to be transcended over time by

empire. It is this terror that gives rise to the empire of stories

mentioned before. A tsunami wave of fertility was controlled by

the emperor by setting up his empire around a staggered con-

figuration of bazaars between the desert and the forest. each

stage had a headman who was an incarnation, a simulacrum

or an auratic extension of the emperor in the ‘local’. For the

real historic dynamic of the Asian bazaar is the experience of

migration where periods of absolute hunger are sublimated in

absolute plenitude, such being the demographic experience of

history with the alternation of barren and extremely fertile ter-

rain that is asia. absolute hunger is that which produces the

danger of greed and massacre when faced with sudden pleni-

tude after long periods of deprivation. Within the bazaars heaps

of produce were calibrated through a bonsai idea of proportion

with respect to cosmic plenitude, an intuitive non-mathematical,

‘global’ order of measuring in the totality of human experience

in history; a functioning of aniconic thought with materiality that

could resolve the ups and downs of history by working through

the heap.

Colonialism, the last of the lot to pillage the Orient, arrived

with an aim to prospect the world to deliver on its revolutionary

promise to citizens of an equitable distribution of the sensible

and in the process triggered off atavistic tendencies towards

insurgency that had been buried deep underneath the network

of bazaars. In addition, the colonizers fell prey to the spell of

the heap (as seen in Herzog’s aguirre) and ended up creating

the civil wars of the Third World. It is possible that in the West

the desire to sublimate the struggles of history in the heap were

thwarted by the medium-range productivity of environments.

Christian Europe was defined by a martial elite that abjured the

pleasures of the flesh (no harem here, the cult of the courte-

san, Salome, attenuated), money (anti-Semitism, the myth of

Herod the tyrant) and unwavering hostility towards renunciants

(the gradual hypostasis of the memory of the eremitic fathers

of early Christianity, the minoritization of St John the Baptist)

(aren’t we here in a variant of the Sati, Daksha, Shiva story?).

Such attitudes probably hid in the martial unconscious a canny

calculus of energy-time needed to survive the barren or at best

moderately productive Western climes. The heap produced

there was never big enough to cancel out historical memory of

lives sacrificed to nature’s indomitable fierceness and therefore

there remained a paranoia of death from hunger despite territo-

rial conquest.

It is worth asking why civil wars rage in areas where pri-

mary capitalism is operational. We need to ask why a caste-like

organization of labour exists in such places consisting of slave

miners, the local trader, warrior-like corporate figures and an

international diplomacy acting like a brahmin to keep an insur-

gent situation in bare minimum check. The rise of market cor-

poratism and the emergence of a global caste order replacing

what were once bazaars signals yet another crisis in the global

imagination about plenitude, something that has never been

thought through as an economic problematic instead being al-

ways discussed through the christian idea of greed and sin.

and it is for this reason that the bazaar languishes in human

thought as a relic of the primitive past, something that needs

to be transcended, instead of being seen as a form of aniconic

economic thinking that has more to do with a collective shar-

ing of the measure of cosmic grandeur than European post-

revolutionary economic thinking of budgets, commodities and

discrete numbers. When Buddhists burn up heaps of worldly

goods on the day of the Buddha’s birth they are indicating that

earth and labour always produces more than can go around.

Such an event is the positive of the negative of the kitsch pop

2726

culture moment, like a John Waters film, that burns up the

excess of productivity in the cinematic melodrama of modern

life. Today, such excess is what defines the uncanny magic

moment of the perception of the found object, something dis-

carded that can still be worked upon for value beyond the uses

of conventional history. We burn up found objects since we are

all excessive of history in the Law, it is the excess of our sen-

sory desire that begins to define everything as found, discrete,

uncanny, on the verge of being bereft of social meaning, on

the verge of being returned to the logic of pure object-ness.

Objects have accrued a confused tangle of too many creative

impulses, too many to be contained by the senses, by the Law

and the impulse therefore is to go back to a degree zero of

perception to start life anew. the found object is thus the pas-

sage from the market to the bazaar, or rather it is a passage

in which the bazaar continuously operates on the plane of the

market. There is a fecundating gaze working on the found ob-

ject, a desire for the object to magically multiply in the force of

the gaze to make up for a culture of absolute lack. In short, the

more the cult of the found object intensifies in market cultures

the more the bazaar principle is operational in the unconscious

of such cultures.

In the positive of the bazaar, things are thought through in

heaps from the moment of production through consumption to

the sacrificial burning off of cosmic excess. The law of conser-

vation of energy will ensure that the next time around the same

scale of cosmic produce will come along, hence what was ex-

cessive in one cycle of productivity needs to be shed off. Only it

may be that the distribution of the outcrop of heaps may not be

in the same place as before, the cartographies of life may keep

shifting with every cycle. There is no timeless territory defined

by a timeless legal order, no illusion that the Law can stabilize

nature in the commodity, instead, territory shifts and in each

scenario where things settle a little, one performs, playacts and

the iconic makes a spectral playful appearance only to break

down before the demands of demography. To keep a sense

of continuity in the nomadic movement of communities there is

the peripatetic monk/the angel of technology circulating through

the globe to keep the totality of cosmic fertility together in his

traveling being. For more mundane human needs, for the need

to playact history and law, or for that matter any act of settling

down, as a passing idea or illusion bound to fail, there is always

the bazaar. the bazaar where the courtesan’s piquant dance

and song cocking a snook at dreams of iconic stability with her

sudden offer of cosmic largesse to the desiring eye will always

oppose the stern totalizing of monomaniacal tyrants.

28

bazaar / market

an essay by Kaushik Bhaumikcover image source Still From Life Of Oharu By kenji mizoguchi, 1952cover design by Sherna Dasturinside image source Ahmedabad kite festival from Godaam, Majlis Video Archivelayout design by Paroma Sadhana publisher Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art Berlinprinted at Spenta Multimedia, Mumbai, India may, 2013

isbn 978-3-944692-02-9

this publication is part of keYwording, a project by madhusree Dutta and Ines Schaber

Other publications within KEYwording:

ANALOGuE rajula Shah arSenaL erika and Ulrich Gregor enGLISH Arundhathi Subramaniam FOOD nanna Heidenreich and Daniel Hendrickson RELATIONS Florian Wüst Screen Erik Göngrich with Alexander Boldt, Hans-Joachim Fetzer, Anna Hoffmann, Gesa Knolle, Birgit Kohler, Angelika Ramlow, Markus Ruff, Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, uli Ziemons (IN GERMAN)

STORY TELLING merle kröger and Philip Scheffner StrIke Sergei m. eisenstein (IN GERMAN & ENGLISH)

terraIn Riki Kalbe and Wolfgang Kil (IN GERMAN & ENGLISH) tranSIt madhusree Dutta VEIL Flavia Agnes

fUnDeD BY

keYwording is part of Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice, a project by Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art Berlin