Critical Approaches to Culture + Media

Imagine, if you will, that you have been given the chance to design your own shopping mall. How would you think about the space? What services would you make available to the consumers you wanted to attract? Which stores would you highlight? How would you give the mall a character of its own? Would you make it like a long hallway or give it the qualities of a large and spacious hall? Are you looking for intimacy or anonymity? Do you want people to be able to see each other as they shop? Or would you prefer the kind of space which, similar to a shopping street, keeps consumers on the move and therefore less likely to interact with each other? Would you look for ways of encouraging if not creating a public space, somewhat like a square in the grand European tradition, where large numbers of people could congregate? How would you manage an environment in which the public space might take on more importance than the shops or restaurants within the mall? Should there be parks inside malls? Are they really no different than early twentieth century music halls, places of entertainment and pleasure and voyeurism? All of these questions circle around another and perhaps more primary one. What analytical tools will serve us best in trying to understand the mall as fundamental part of twenty-first century life and as a representation of the way in which our culture, our society, thinks about itself? The author, Susan Buck-Morss wrote a book entitled, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1991) which is about arcades in Europe during the late eighteenth century. She begins with a quote from from Benjamin: “We have,��? so says the illustrated guide to Paris from the year 1852, a complete picture of the city of the Seine and its environs, “repeatedly thought of the arcades as interior boulevards, like those they open onto. These passages, a new discovery of industrial luxury, are glass-covered, marble-walled walkways through entire blocks of buildings, the owners of which have joined together to engage in such a venture. Lining both sides of these walkways which receive their light from above are the most elegant of commodity shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature.��? Buck-Morss talks about Benjamin's desire to examine historical phenomena and make them talk — to bring to life the ‘everyday’ not as text but as subject for conversation and exchange. It is, so to speak, the objects of modern day consumerism which need to be given life, not to overvalue them or even confer upon them a status which they don't deserve, but to uncover in their very existence the way in which mass culture works. Benjamin saw cities as intensely transient places where spatial and temporal relations undergo non-stop change. The city becomes an environment of traces and memories. No sooner have you moved from one sphere of experience than you encounter another. People are in motion as are cars and trains and buses. Destinations are merely short-term stopovers in the constant flow. This sense of movement transforms reality into a dreamscape. Yet it is a reality which nonetheless services the people who use it. It is this relationship between the functional and the imaginary which I will explore. Though he may not have used the term, Benjamin was in fact approaching the analysis of malls and cities as an ethnography. He saw the covered shopping arcades of the nineteenth century as replicas of an internal consciousness, a collective dream dependent on ‘commodity fetishism’. At the same time the malls represented all that was utopian in the projections of a culture oriented towards commodities and consumerism. To be continued...........