Nantes 5: The Market and Several Unfulfilled Parallels

The Moroccan figs and incense, the paperback copies of the Qur’an, the stunningly dyed fabrics, sat behind the stumbling shrimp, the sleek, cold forms of giant, iced, dying fish, the mussels like coral, the twisted, dense baguettes in their usual, myriad form. They sat behind the 5 Euro pairs of jeans and the 6 Euro pairs of sneakers, the 3 Euro pairs of women’s underwear and the 2 Euro gallettes and crepes. Behind, I must admit, I must address, is a term relative to one’s approach, to one’s orientation. It would be easy, I am sure, to imagine that there is no back to a Saturday morning market, that the immense parking lot-become-marketplace is without front, without back, without privileged location. Since I am no conspiracist, and since I intend to disseminate no conspiracy, I will agree, immediately, with what is easy to imagine, and although I have already revealed a bias, although I have already implanted a tone, I will defend what comes hereafter against accusations of unfounded, biased, or inflammatory rhetoric, mostly through a series of confessions. The market is subject to approach, to point of entrance, just as it is subject to perspective, to atmospheric conditions. If I had come upon the market from the riverside, the figs might have been the first item I saw, behind nothing and in front of the entire market. But I approached the market, the Saturday morning Nantes city market, from Nantes, from the city, straight, in fact, from Centre Ville. The first items for sale that I came upon were the sleek, dying forms of the iced fish.

I would like to be granted, if I may even be allowed the request, a slight digression here. I am, as I write, after all not at the market, and there may be a certain logic to allowing more recent experience to co-author this text. When my copine first arrived in Nantes, she explained to me this evening, she had just become acquainted with a new friend and the two were to spend the afternoon together, the former accompanying the latter, a French citizen, on her search for employment. During the events of the afternoon, my copine was surprised to note that her friend’s curriculum vitae, her resume, included a photograph of herself; this was no improvisation on the part of the French citizen, no attempt to personalize her resume, but a mere compliance with alleged government policy. When one files for unemployment in France, when one applies for a job, one must include, in the designated spot, a passport-style photograph. It should, however, be noted that the author could not find definitive confirmation of this at the time of publication.

As the digression ebbs, allow the brisk Saturday morning along the river to return (although, if you will recall, we approached city side). At this market, one is given to the wills of so many others – the crowd is immense, and many of the apparently more regular, more seasoned market-goers trail clumsily behind them pieces of wheeled luggage, as they do possibly a week’s worth of shopping in produce and fish, although the bread is likely bought daily. I cannot and will not claim that, of these people, I saw no one patronizing the booth selling figs and incense, or the booth selling the Qur’an or the fabrics. In fact, another digression wells, and prevents me from claiming anything more, for the moment, about the market. The market may, in fact, be the digression, if the reader so prefers.

The French government will not ask you (nor anyone) to declare an ethnic origin, nor a religious affiliation, systemically; and formlessly, or rather, I mean to say, less formally, the French will ask you not to declare such things. This is so, one can assume – and indeed, at least one, it should be noted, is assuming – because of an idea of Democracy, because of an idea of privacy and Democracy’s relation to such. This policy is a sort of attempt at a guarantee against bias, against discrimination. This, like any policy, is potentially flawed, and specifically so in the way that it makes impossible any attempt at tracing, tracking, or unearthing bias or discrimination. That is, if one were to say, for example, that the recent riots in suburban France may have reflected the frustration felt by immigrant, largely Muslim populations who perceive, who believe that they are abandoned and unofficially ghettoized by the government, the system itself (personified, for the moment, leaving specific leadership aside) might respond with a suitably systemic shrug, which would communicate the (potentially smug) notion that one cannot reasonably respond to such accusations / theories, because one has no idea (officially) if those people who were burning cars and throwing petrol bombs are immigrant Muslims or upper-class, white Protestants.

The author cannot and so will not presume to make definitive judgments, value judgments on this method of managing a country’s population, but will instead hide (as entirely as is possible) behind assumptions and vague assertions. This method of managing a country’s population, while in print leaves room for nothing but absolute, Absolute Democracy, its existent reality in fact leaves room for and invites the whole different animal of wild assumption and vague assertion. “I should perhaps confess that what tortures me, the question that has been putting me to the question, might just be related to what structures a particular axiomatic of a certain democracy, namely, the turn, the return to self of the circle and the sphere, and thus the ipseity of the One, the autos of autonomy, symmetry, homogeneity, the same, the like, the semblable or the similar, and even, finally, God, in other words everything that remains incompatible with, even clashes with, another truth of the democratic, namely, the truth of the other, heterogeneity, the heteronomic and the dissymmetric, disseminal multiplicity, the anonymous ‘anyone,’ the ‘no matter who,’ the indeterminate ‘each one’” (Derrida, 14). One will never ask one’s ethnic background, and one will be asked not to share such information, but “Do you spell Ibrahim with two or three ‘E’s?” And, of course, there is the aforementioned photograph on resumes.

Now I feel that I must make a concession – no, an admission, but no concession – for we have arrived at a certain place in the text where decisions must be made, on one part or another. The admission is that – and I make this admission not without a certain concession – this piece of writing was intended, originally, but not consciously or explicitly, to be something that resembled a form of patriotism. Now, however, concessions made, confessions pregnant, I am hesitant to unleash what I presently see may, in practice (that is, the practice of writing) become a sort of patriotism – that is, a naiveity, that would threaten to level the entire (non)argument so far (not really) set up. Perhaps I will still have recourse to write about Chicago’s torillas, but, perhaps, a concession must first be made, on both the part of the author and the part of the reader; that is, another digression.

Over lunch this afternoon, an acquaintance shared her experience of and reflections on a film she had recently seen. This film, politically charged and poignant, for her, illustrated many of the more disturbing aspects of the current French political climate, namely the gaining of power and momentum that presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy is experiencing and engineering. This woman, reasonably speaking for likeminded French individuals, described her concern at seeing Sarkozy simultaneously increasing the thrust of his allegedly anti-immigrant, classist rhetoric, and gaining trust or, at the very least, visibility with the French public. The primary problem, as the film illustrated, is not necessarily a complete lack of opposition, but more profoundly, a complete lack of unity among the opposition. There is a “left” or a Left in France, but much of the Left is in disarray, she explained, for the fact that, while some engage in grounded, logical debate, voicing well-founded opposition, too many instead engage in various forms of mudslinging and radical but seemingly chaotic and ill-founded forms of opposition, which appears, often, entirely anti-, but entirely without any sense of pro-. In a word, while many oppose the Right, the opposition has no leader. Sarkozy, my French friend explained, is not even as popular as he appears, but since he appears as such, he holds a lot of water (although, as finance minister, Sarkozy managed to secure the highest approval ratings of anyone in the French government). He effectively makes use of media, of television and the internet, to construct and maintain a certain visibility, often making somewhat outrageous and inflammatory claims, using questionable, subtly racist terminology to the ultimate end of notoriety. The response comes multifaceted but disparate – the less responsible strains of the opposition give a bad name to the entire opposition, a lack of unity gives birth to frustrated, violent outbursts, and the Right simply has more fodder for disregarding, for belittling the opposition.

While this film so effectively illustrated these ideas for my new acquaintance, it did so not by any direct elucidation, but instead by remarkable parallel. It did so, one might speculate, unintentionally. The film, in fact, is an American film, and distinctly so, dealing entirely with American events. The film is Goodnight and Good Luck, which portrays the particular episode, if you will, in the larger Red Scare, as fronted by United States Senator Joseph McCarthy.

McCarthy’s project was relatively short-lived in the history of the United States (though roughly four long years, I am sure they were), and left my experience of America (certainly not unaffected, but at least) relatively unscathed. That is, I should say, however I feel about McCarthy’s attempts to turn his paranoia into a re-shaping of the country, I still walk down the Chicago streets of my beloved Mexican immigrant neighborhood, about as suspiciously pink (by McCarthy’s standards) as any senator could hope for, unshaven, eating fresh tortillas and humming any number of versions of “Song for Ché.” And just then, or rather, just now, it occurs to me: was I merely at the wrong market? See, whether this last question is a painful oversimplification or if the market story itself fills that role remains to be seen. But what occurred to me as I prepared to unwittingly unleash a stream of naïve patriotism, or nostalgia for Chicago, was that I may have simply been at the wrong market. Any of the farmers’ markets that take place in Daley Plaza include large numbers of white suburban farmers (or farm owners), and the markets in Roscoe Village do not include tamale stands. Chicago, in fact, is the fifth most racially segregated city (by neighborhood) in the United States, according to a recent Urban League study, and so, I have had to remind myself, just because I like to spend my time there in the historically Mexican neighborhoods, that, in itself, bears no witness to some idea that Chicago embraces its immigrant populations any more than Nantes does. And so a parallel emerges, if a sort of unfulfilled one, and I am left curious as to whether or not there is a certain, considerable, poor, young, white artist demographic who choose to live in the immigrant suburbs of France, to take advantage of the cheap rent and the vibrant immigrant culture. Although I have, in fact, met many young, white artists, this does not seem to be the case with any of them.

This all, of course, speaks nothing to the fact that the Red Scare of the 1950s will likely, given enough time, pale in comparison to the current state of political affairs in the United States. But as the reader will have forgiven the author his confessions, concessions, admissions, and digressions, perhaps the reader can similarly forgive the limits of perspective herein.



Derrida, Jacques. Rogues. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005.