Reading the Shopping Mall City If the shopping mall is a text, and specifically an encoded text of a city, how shall we read it?

As a seemingly endless concatenation of crass, vulgar displays urging consumerism and

overspending: as dystopia reified? To Joan Didion, for example, malls are "toy garden cities in

which no one lives but everyone consumes..." (179). Or shall we see this text, these malls, as the

representation of an idealized city, a contemporary fabrication of the mythical, utopian city? And

is it a city advanced beyond words, a city relying on images to express the structure within, that

urban structure which is, as Ihab Hassan once said, "invisible, imaginary, made of dream and

desire, agent of all our transformations" (94)?

An understanding of this dependence on images is crucial to an appreciation of the traditional

semiotics of the mall-as-city. Concurrent with the development of the mall, a concept with a

coherent genealogy dating from the mid-nineteenth century, is the movement toward visual

language as a prime transmitter of culture. In Western societies today, for instance, films, videos,

and television are the primary bearers of narrative form. The panoply of the shopping mall

provides an experience more active and direct than those filtered through a camera; it contains the

visual media--the signs--for subjects to manipulate into the terms of their own texts. This

manipulation results in a poetics and theatre emanating from the people, the shoppers, since

anyone is free to play with the images and create a personal story, however brief, ephemeral, or

surreal.

Cities, of course, can be read as texts. Their topographies reflect, among other things, the

economic stratification of urban life. But just as communities and neighborhoods within cities

bind, so do they isolate and limit: witness the desolation of so many of our inner cities.

Boundaries among groups in cities tend to be rigid, the demarcations sharp and unyielding. The

mall, on the other hand, with its recombinant properties, its reduction to basic forms not unlike

those of abstract art, offers a more democratic hope and possibility, despite its connection to

private enterprise. This democratic impulse owes itself in part to the ease with which the visual

language is acquired and, secondly, to the fact that it is an aspect of mass culture associated

primarily with the feminine. Mass culture itself--traditionally denigrated because of this

association with the feminine--implies conditions of accessibility and inclusion.[ 1] The shopping

mall's tale of a city, despite its minimalist components, can be more multifaceted and more

challenging to read than that of a traditional city.

I return to my question: What is the nature of this mall city, if city it is? How shall we decipher its

code? Much has been written of the carefully calculated design of malls: the scientifically

determined mix of shops, the necessity of appropriate department store anchors, the awareness of

Reilly's Law of Retail Gravitation (people generally will patronize the largest mall in the area),

and the understanding of the Gruen Transfer (the metamorphosis of a goal-oriented shopper into

the more welcome aimless browser, named after Victor Gruen, architect of the first enclosed mall

in 1956 at Southdale in Edina, Minnesota). Surrender and disorientation of shoppers, calculated

succumbing to white noise and "architectural transparency" (Olalquiaga 2): no wonder critics see

mall visitors as duped, doped, lulled! Is it just possible, though, that these visitors are liberated at

least as much as they are drugged? What can be made of the willingness of real people to seek

such a seemingly passive experience, and to court it happily, repeatedly, often? Mall critics tend

to see only the manipulation of consumers through the careful creation of false needs and desires.

Yet mall planners, for all their sophisticated formulae of store mix and analyses of consumption

patterns, cannot determine--and possibly cannot interpret--what actually happens to the individual

on its premises. Considering the tremendous appeal of shopping malls, I think that it makes more

sense to argue that shopping malls address real needs and desires, which are albeit somewhat

mediated by the machinations of capitalism.[ 2]

The mall as a place to visit has its roots in the advent of the department store, which dates from

the mid-nineteenth century, and which was patterned on the great expositions in Europe and the

United States. With the department store, commerce shifted dramatically from one where

purchases were made on the basis of need from traveling merchants to one where shoppers

contemplated purchases based on desire in their excursions to the stores. Once at the store,

shoppers gazed on an array of merchandise, especially on displays of luxury goods, which had

been transformed into artifacts of the seemingly possible. These shoppers (primarily middle-class

white women) were invited to look, and consequently looking became a leisure-time activity. This

paradigm of visualizing culture, i.e., looking at merchandise, represented a shift in emphasis from

production to consumption, or from use-value to exchange-value in Marxist terms. Fixed prices

eliminated bargaining, and ostensibly directed attention to purchase, at the same time that the

fantastic displays of luxury--now freshly accessible at least in their visual form to an average

shopper--encouraged "just looking." (Fixed prices, however, did not fix the values of the goods to

the shoppers, an idea I will take up later.) Shopping became an exercise in pleasure and diversion?

With this history in mind, it is no surprise that today's progeny of the nineteenth century

expositions and department stores--the shopping malls--are now tourist destinations.[ 4] Alberta's

number one tourist draw--it attracts twenty million visitors yearly--is the West Edmonton Mall,

the largest shopping mall in North America. Even in Orange County, California, a place rife with

tourist attractions, the South Coast Plaza is the third most popular tourist destination, after

Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, weekly

attracts 600,000 to 900,000 visitors, depending on the season. In its first twenty months alone, 60

million people came to the Mall of America. Thus it seems appropriate to read the mall not in

terms of consumer necessity, but rather in terms of leisure and pleasure. "[T]o walk in the

contemporary place of pleasure, the shopping mall," Roger Keller Simon observes, "is to walk

through the avenues of the postmodern mentality. What we see, neatly symbolized and codified,

are both the promises and problems of commodified life. It is only a matter of learning how to

read the meanings of the space" (248).

The space itself is relatively small, which intensifies the flavor and experience of urban life. It is,

to be sure, a sanitized city, as critics charge: a place purified, a city devoid of weather and of

undesirables, such as street people. Yet because it is a place of ideological and cultural exchange,

the mall does indeed function as a city. And if the mall is a city, an "expression of human

ingenuity," as Joyce Carol Oates once described the city (11), then the mall is one liberated from

the burden of heavenly mimesis Mircea Eliade so eloquently described as the impetus for city

design. And freed from this fixed formality of the constellations, the mall creates its own chaotic

carnival, one inviting personal satiation within its walls, one mimicking the traditional lure of the

city. True, vestiges of a modern city remain; the Mall of America, for example, has given its main

arcades familiar street names: South Boulevard, West Market, East Broadway, and North Garden,

but this may be a way to disguise the mall developers' "profound distrust of the street" (Crawford

21). The argument goes that mall developers dislike the chaos and unpredictability of city streets,

although, it seems to me, one also can argue that certain encoded practices--geography, time of

day, and so on--inscribe city streets with fairly predictable rhythms as well. But even more sinister

than a mall's failure of urban faith and nerve, they say, is the mall's appropriation of the agora, the

democratic public space. They see the mall as a place that retains the ostensible characteristics of

city life while eliminating the possibilities of public expression and social adhesion. The agora,

however, has traditionally been hostile to women, while the mall, in contrast, invites and

welcomes women particularly. In this the mall may foster other more subtle forms of expression,

its critics notwithstanding. In its incarnation as what Tracy C. Davis calls "a self-contained

privately owned city," and what Michael Sorkin despairs as "a city without a place attached to it,"

the mall-metropolis is liberated from its past, its traditions, and, some would say, its

responsibility, particularly evinced as an absence of what Fredric Jameson calls the "collective

project."

A vivid example of the synchronic rather than the diachronic, the mall is a space removed from

historical progression, making possible what Jameson disparagingly notes in his famous critique

of the postmodern an "experience of pure material Signifiers,...a series of pure and unrelated

presents in time" (72). Thus, at West Edmonton one finds both submarines and a replica of

Columbus's Santa Maria situated in a lagoon with real coral and plastic seaweed, live penguins

and electronically controlled plastic sharks. But isn't this also the stuff of poetry? The risky

inventiveness of these juxtapositions recalls Marianne Moore's definition of poetry: "imaginary

gardens with real toads in them." Critics, however, find sinister disparities in these anachronisms.

The intention, they caution, is to produce an exotic unexpected synergy that induces desire and

creates consumption by suspending the use-value of an object in order to increase its cachet. That

a visitor finds similar collapses of time under one roof, say, in natural history museums does not

generate critical commentary, although Margaret Crawford points out with some alarm that many

contemporary museums are borrowing designs and experiential techniques from shopping malls

(29-30).

The mall itself, no longer a buffer between the human and natural worlds, which was one function

of a traditional city, carves a fresh and ahistorical space from the drab monotony of contemporary

life via the totalitarian opulence of its inside passageways. The intention and effect of the mall

space are to liberate us from both the quotidian and the past. Is it, though, a "mindless descent into

vulgarity," to borrow Peter Hemenway's phrase in his critique of the West Edmonton Mall (35)?

Such criticism of structure ignores the myriad of resistant and reappropriated practices of mall

visitors. While the loss of the security once afforded by historical progression is real, the escape

from history also is the essence of romance; the promise of anonymity always has been an

attraction of the city, where one may shed one's history and begin anew. Broadly speaking,

settlements in North America are based on the escape from history. What this continent's first

settlers generated was a re-creation of themselves based on hope and vision as well as dread and

foreboding. It is important to remember as well that a romantic outlook always is in service of and

limited by the romancer. Consequently, the city--the existential one and the imaginary one--is a

narcissistic construct made by and for the romancer.

Let me summarize here my three recurring ideas. The first is that there is a profound distinction

between structure and practice. Malls, for all the calculations of their designs, for all the goals of

consumption and profits, are reappropriated by visitors into resistant and generative practices far

different from the intention and purpose of the space. Visitors, in short, reappropriate the space to

satisfy their own purposes in contemporary life. The second assumption is that malls have

particular appeal to women--I write especially (and knowingly) of white women (since I am one);

this appeal developed from the matrix of historic discriminatory practices against them. Other

marginal groups--adolescents, the elderly, minorities--respond to malls based on personal desires

and traditions of societal exclusion. Finally, the mall represents the visualizing of culture, the

creation of personal narratives through new forms. The mall itself is a representation of a city; and

its visitors may create their own stories within it.

Idealized cities are the places that call to us to realize our dreams; malls are designed with this

philosophy in mind. Hemenway notes that the mall is "a sugar-coated dream world where we can

shop, play, and experience danger and delight without once stepping outside .... "He adds that he

cannot imagine architectural students studying its design, excitedly copying features into their

sketchbooks. "There is no architecture to sketch," he says flatly (35). The blandness of shopping

malls is a welldocumented fact. The uniform, easily cleaned and maintained surfaces are familiar

to all; there is, moreover, an alarming departicularization of place. But a plain surface, like a

freshly gessoed canvas, provides the foundation for artistic inscription. In addition, the experience

of any mall is primarily subjective; the psychic movements are subterranean and profound. While

the "visual fantasy" (Hemenway's term) of a mall seems to pander to the contemporary desire for

vicarious experiences and simulacra, the attempt to lift the material world to abstractions of pain

and pleasure, to make the space itself speak and shape, is akin to the creation of a medium for

self-transcendence. The possibilities inherent in the displays of form and color are the essence of

art, particularly abstract art, "art stripped bare," as Robert Motherwell expressed it.

Using or imagining the use of individual objects is a form of expression that transcends

consumption. As John Fiske puts it in his chapter "Shopping for Pleasure" from his book Reading

the Popular: "Consumption is not just the endpoint of the economic chain that began with

production, but a system of exchange, a language in which commodities are goods to think with in

a semiotic system that precedes the individual, as does any language" (30). Where language once

mediated reality, now consumer goods and the geometry of architectural space are the signs for

recreating the world. Judith Williamson writes that "people's wants and needs are translated into

the form of consumption," and consumption--the purchase and subsequent owning of objects-

offers a measure of control in lives that are so constructed and defined by race, gender, and class

that there are few other means of control (Consuming Passions 230). The translation between

signifier and signified (object and meaning) is less than exact as a vehicle of expression, as is true

with all languages. The interstices between the objects and the images they conjure becomes the

textual space, the blank page or the gessoed canvas where a person inscribes her story.

Williamson, whose theorizing developed from one that saw consumerism as regressive action to

one that sees it as progressive expression, understood early on that "[i]n buying products with

certain 'images' we create ourselves, our personality, our qualities, even our past and future"

(Decoding Advertisements 70; qtd. in Simon 234). This romantic projection, this symbolic sleight

of hand can be extended to a larger context. Leo Marx once noted that "[i]n imaginative literature,

indeed, the concept of 'the city' must be understood as in large measure as an abstract receptacle

for displaced feelings about other things" (64). Since the mall enacts the city of the imagination, it

represents the material realization and expression of thought, but the kinetic journey one

undertakes in a mall is the journey from matter to spirit.

Simon points out that the mall is "[s]et apart from the rest of the world as a place of earthly delight

like the medieval walled garden..." (231). Separated from the rest of the world, it possesses the

characteristic both of a retreat, a place for spiritual enlightenment, and a resort, a place for secular

refreshment: City of Heaven and City of Earth. It is neither; it is both. Function, distinctions,

definitions are blurred. All share characteristics. Isolation is the mall's attraction; escape motivates

its visitors. In his book, The Mall: An Attempted Escape from Everyday Life, Jerry Jacobs

describes the mall as a "haven for those who are bored, disenfranchised, and loaded down with

'time.'" These people, and others, he says, are engaged in a "search for meaning" and a "flight

from boredom" (15). The mall, he argues, helps people to cope, providing relief from the

stultifying ennui of everyday life. As a result, most mall visitors are not there to make purchases.

Fiske cites a study showing that 80 percent of unemployed young people went to the mall once a

week as did nearly 100 percent of unemployed young women. There apparently is, moreover, a

confrontational style of young people who appropriate mall space in their social groups for the

sole purpose of challenging that consumer space. These young people--indeed most people, I must

add-who visit a mall truly are just looking, trying on images, with no intention to buy (Fiske 15-

17). Shoppers play with the images, the semiotic signatures of contemporary life, the way a poet

or a writer might play with words or an artist might experiment with color and texture. They

invest their deepest longings, their most profound desires, in ordinary objects. These objects

represent and reflect our daily experiences and desires in coalesced form.

Manifestations of desire, escape, and transcendence belong to a long tradition of seeking

sanctuary in commercial space. Francis X. Clines, writing of Macy's in New York as a sort of

vacation destination, acknowledges that "[s]ure, Macy's is a great place to shop, but it's at least as

good as an escapist urban cube for wandering within, a shelter from the madding subway beggars

down below Herald Square hawking their needs, from the three-card-monte swindlers on the

sidewalks, from the general jostle and anomie of Gotham .... The retail cathedral's mainfloor aisles

still serve perfectly for sanctuary" (16). A number of other writers note the "sacred space being

appropriated by the marketplace" (Simon 245). Wanamaker's in downtown Philadelphia, for

instance, has its cathedral-like design and its famous pipe organ. Retreat and resort, commercial

space blurs sacred and secular. What people are seeking in the objects and the valences they carry

is some anchoring, some sort of truth not unlike religious or spiritual insight, that has eluded

them--particularly women--in contemporary life. The result is something that might be called the

iconicity of the everyday?

With its emphasis on a thriving inner life, the contemporary mall welcomes this wonderful

confusion of sacred and secular. For like a true city, the mall radiates its peculiar life from a

center, a center that is neither temple nor heart of darkness, but rather one that is calculated to

inspire childlike wonder: a cascading fountain, a skating rink, a cheerful carrousel, a carefree

amusement park. This exuberance itself suggests the postmodem: new life forms emerging from

the detritus of failed ideas, such as traditional religion and conventional cynicism. Uncrushed by

the death of concepts of progress, the mall's imperturbable outer membrane encloses a world

teeming with life, wit, hope, humor, and possibility. The mall is a site Of shifting shapes and

constant change; it is continuously redefining and reinventing itself. It encourages its visitors to do

likewise. The wariness that Leo Marx has noted concerning the "transformation of society and

culture" (64) associated with the city, especially the industrial city, is set to rest in the

postindustrial perfected space of the mall. Indeed, it's possible to think of the mall as stubbornly

resistant to the excesses of modernism's cohesiveness, individualism, and conquest of nature.

The mall doesn't look like a space devoted to resistance and rebellion, but then neither does a

nineteenth century Impressionist painting. Yet one is reminded that the Impressionist painters in

France were rebels of a sort against the industrial revolution in their temperament, subject matter,

and style. That this rebellion is expressed in the purely visual form of painting is significant.

Parallels between malls and Impressionism abound: the exultation of leisure, the elegance of the

everyday (which creates a concomitant elitist resistance regarding this confusion of high culture

with mass culture), the glorification of middle class life, the foregrounding of the visual (and, by

implication, emotional) experience of the artist rather than the subject (that is, the replacement of

the signified with the signifier), and, of course, the obsession with light.

The Impressionists concerned themselves with light, particularly light in nature. To render the

qualities of this light, the Impressionists painted out-of-doors. They were collaborators with

nature; so are mall architects. Malls, of course, are indoor spaces, but the fascination with light

remains, although it is mediated (just as it is to an observer of a painting). Materials in the West

Edmonton Mall were chosen for their reflective qualities "to give the illusion of permanent

sunshine" (Davis 4), and in the Centre Court there is a fantastic commingling of natural and

artificial light, illuminating a computer-controlled fountain, and creating a space that invites the

visitor to relax and forget outside pressures. Virtually every mall makes similar use of the natural

light.

Where the Impressionists encountered nature and light directly and rendered them artificially,

mall visitors encounter nature and light indirectly but experience them with an immediacy;

visitors absorb themselves in "realizations of imagined pictures" (Davis 9). To stroll through a

mall today is to become an actor in a fabricated landscape, for the mall encompasses a leisurely

world and creates an artificial park, a space that didn't conquer nature--the modernist impulse--so

much as supplant it. Moreover, the transformative context of the mall urges the artist-actors to

recreate themselves, revealing a "a self-referential construction of their lives in the latest

technological mode" (Davis 13). The confusion of the aesthetic with the cornmodified allows

people to incorporate displays into a narrative of self-exploration, helping them toward who they

imagine they want to be.

In this world of fantasy, visitors attempt to purchase hope and create aura (Jacobs 104). The

presence of on the average five times as many women's clothing stores and three times as many

women's shoe stores as there are for men (Tooley 66) is illustrative. Fashion and cosmetics are

tools of fantasy, enabling women "to pretend to escape from the routine trivia of everyday life, by

making believe that they look and live like someone they are not, but would like to be" (Jacobs

104). Fiske suggests that participation in fashion is one of the few means available for women to

try on the myth of progress (41). Jacobs concludes: "In short, through these pretend maneuvers,

we try to convince others that we have transcended the constraints of everyday life, and that the

life we live is interesting, adventurous and exciting" (105). This persuasion assumes an audience:

this is mall theatre. Its future-orientated text marks it as the narrative of desire, the forward look to

the possible, and the escape from that common other future-oriented emotion: anxiety. And there's

a practical aspect, too.

The way a woman presents herself can be seen as a form of control, a means of disciplining the

look directed toward her (Fiske 34). Moreover, to make meaning and not just receive it is a

founding tenet of contemporary feminism. Choice of objects worn, in addition, requires the

activity of the chooser; it "enhances the power of the subordinate to make their cultural uses of it"

(Fiske 35). Finally, the fantasy play-action also suggests the potential for shuffling the social

order. Class boundaries are challenged. In many malls, the lower level shops are identified with

working classes, upper floors with the elite. Orange County's South Coast Plaza, for example,

features Sears and J.C. Penney's on its lower floors, while designer shops such as Cartier and

Gucci are on upper floors. A simple ride on an escalator in such places, then, is not just a trip to a

destination; it is a foray into another social class. As Fiske points out: "class identities based on

economics offer little scope for negotiation; those based on style are not only more flexible, but

also offer the consumer greater control in their construction" (37).

The poles of love and work said by Freud to dominate our impulses, are, after all, the terms of a

masculine consciousness; since the institutions surrounding love and work often oppress women,

the mall offers women welcome escape from both. The mall fills a gap between the containment

of the home and the vastness--and often hostile foreigness---of public space. The link of shopping

spaces to the feminine has a long history, as I've shown, Department stores in the nineteenth

century were one of the few places where women could venture unaccompanied. Today's mall in

particular is a secured space; no one-including the woman herself--raises questions or objections

to her traveling there.[ 6] In retail space women traditionally escape their domestic confines while

maintaining links to them through their purchases. Historically, advertising has set about the

business of conquest and surrender; in the marketplace, displays and advertising were designed to

cause the women to be objectified and seduced by the masculine commercial subject.

Furthermore, the women were expected to display the signs of cornmodification, at once making

them the consumer and the consumed. In this context, the woman is differentiated and excluded

from male power and production.7 It is, of course, advantageous for capitalism to link the

romantic and the economic, but the mall at least elevates the concepts from the drudgery of home

and the monotony of work. For women especially the lack of boundaries, the mediation of public

and private space provided by the mall is welcome relief. Able to touch, look, and try on, she

finds the mall's stores as welcoming private space in which she is not confined to the rigid

expectations of a guest. Any purchases become self-symbolic; here, in purchasing, is where a

person exercises control of her life (Fiske 25). The use made of the object is the telling feature;

objects can be re-appropriated in creative ways. Clothing, for instance, can be worn in ways other

than it was intended; this extends the meaning of the object.

And it extends the power of the subject, for a woman can take a semiotic sign and exert control

over its meaning. There are, in short, no fixed values.

This lack of fixed values ironically owes itself to fixed pricing. Such fixed pricing--that is, goods

are marked with a non-negotiable price tag--critics assert, eliminates the social link between buyer

and seller. It is the fixed pricing, however, that has traditionally appealed to women who have felt

so unwelcome in public spaces. Indeed, it is this agreed upon order--fixed prices for commodities,

fixed wages for work--that attracted women to the city in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Such a fixed system that yet eludes fixed values is what made the individual possible--the

individual woman particularly (Oates 18).

Beyond the city of words--that city of blaring ads and mundane conversations--may in fact be a

city of layered silences: not the silence of Jameson's "postliteracy" and lapse of the common

language of our tradition (65), but rather of the slow accretion of a woman's self, not through

ordinary language but rather through the accumulating wisdom of rapidly succeeding moments

and personal encounters with the inanimate.

In addition to the mall as a simulacrum of the sacred and secular city and as an animated

Impressionist painting, the artifice of the mall has been linked in other ways with "natural"

antecedents. Simon, for example, shows how the mall reinterprets the labyrinth or garden maze.

("Labyrinth," with its mythic connotations and its implications of construction, however, is a term

more easily associated with the city.) Designers of Renaissance gardens, Simon points out,

delighted in teasing the visitor and preventing an easy exit. He shows that the designers of malls

and the stores within them create traffic patterns specifically designed to prevent escape, noting

that "Bloomingdale's in the Willow Grove Mall in suburban Philadelphia received so many

complaints from irate shoppers lost in its mazes that finally small, discrete exit signs were posted"

(235).

The path, of course, is a traditional metaphor for life; the contemporary pathways of the mall

invite journeys that evoke but do not follow tradition. The meanings of this type of path, even its

destination, are illusory and elusive. The invented quality of mall byways marks the space with

the qualities of, in Baudrillard's term, a "hyperreal," or the creation of something through

simulation that never before existed. Davis notes that progress through the West Edmonton Mall

is like the unfolding of a movie, scene by scene, as "from each of the fifty-eight entrances an

unusual sight pulls visitors inward toward an elusive vortex" (13). The mall becomes a metaphor

for the intractability and indeterminacy of postmodern life.

The mall itself is an indeterminate space. Unreconciled to the topography of the suburb and

separated from it by a large moat of cars, the mall is a consciously built fortress against the

choking, surging violence of late modernist cities. Usually situated in suburbia, the buffer between

country and city, the mall is a combination of competing and contradicting qualities: present and

future, artifice and nature, "Muslim opulence and Calvinist practicality" (Davis 6), community

and individual, futuristic technology and traditional family values, settlement and escape. The

indeterminacy of the mall may explain its appeal to adolescents who are themselves at an

indeterminate stage of life. Denied the sexual, social, and economic freedom of their elders,

adolescents exert forms of control in the mall as they reconfigure the commodities into street art,

exercising a populist form of in-your-face counter-capitalism. Moreover, the lack of definition of

the mall's inner space may well be the quality that promotes the formation of communities of both

adolescents and the elderly-despite outright attempts by mall management to prevent such

socialization, viewing it as detrimental to commerce (see Lewis). As adolescents are attracted to

the mall by its possibilities for reinterpretation, so are the aged attracted by its offering of the new.

However, the resistance of both of these groups to mall authority evinces an appropriation of the

space with a type of community that is a defense against the "deep subjectivity" that Raymond

Williams noted as one possible outcome of city life (295). As for subjectivity, the indeterminacy

of the space allows for projection, for a resurgence of a kind of infantile primary narcissism--a

narcissism that is synonymous with unlimited possibilities in the world. Such fresh narcissism

allows for combining the contradictions into new forms.

Leo Marx pointed out that we have always been a city-building people (64); we have always

wanted to escape these cities as well. The mall, a beautifully imagined and uninhabitable city,

satisfies those conflicting desires to build cities and escape them. The mall in its reflection of

every possibility--its illusion that its developers have thought of everything--represents the

utopian future that we would have if we could have it now. In its insistence on a cunning

indeterminacy, the mall flaunts its resistance to the masterful ways of the dominant culture.

Nevertheless, disruptions are evident in the ideal world of the mall, including the dissolution of

time into space. In history this is expressed as the cyclical concept of time that once promised

seasonal renewal, the myth of the eternal return, giving way to the temporal continuum, that is, a

linear sense of time based on faith (which began, Eliade tells us, when God asked Abraham to

sacrifice his son). It is a shift from circle to line, from certainty to uncertainty. (We have shifted

from the shopping center, with its linguistic illusion of a moral centering, to the shopping mall,

with its suggestion of a linear promenade and situational responses.)

The evolution of metropolis to decentralized metropolitan area as Eliade described it has

metamorphosed into the de-centering of the subject, which, in turn, ultimately results in what

Celeste Olalquiaga in her spirited study, Megalopolis, calls an "obssessive, paralyzing repetition"

( 1), suggestive of a neurotic fear of moving forward on the continuum and an inability to take the

future purely on faith. This repetition and its ancillary lack of elaborate demarcations of time and

space are part of the substance of the shopping mall. In the mall, for example, are pastiche

representations of other cultures in imagined form: the pasta restaurant representing Italy, the

Victoria's Secret store evoking late nineteenth century life. No attempt is made at authenticity or

even parody; there are no referents in the mall outside its own existence. Consequently, mall

visitors are left to invent their own reality, their own history, their own culture, their own future.

A breakdown between signifier and signified leads to a breakdown between the self and the space

around it. Olalquiaga describes this in terms of dysfunction, as postmodern disease: "Incapable of

demarcating the limits of its own body, lost in the immense area that circumscribes it, the

psychasthenic organism proceeds to abandon its own identity to embrace the space beyond" ( 2).

This makes it easy to see the mall as a place where one may not only escape one's enervated

environment but also oneself. This is a postmodern "self-unmaking," to borrow Hassan's term.

But the lack of boundaries between self and surrounding space, this phenomenon of dislocation, is

not, in my view, yet another postmodern tragedy. Rather, the mall is an enabling space, a place

where a visitor can experiment with and experience the varieties of performance and participation.

Sleek and gleaming, the mall exudes an almost theatrical excitement, as well as the promise of the

heavenly city. Moreover, the displays are interactive; visitors are invited to touch the art, to

examine it, to imagine its possibilities. In this, the mall encourages a kind of performance in

which the patron is sometimes audience, sometimes participant; sometimes object, sometimes

subject. Simon, for instance, notes that in Italian Renaissance gardens, engineers designed

elaborate machinery to move statuary about "in striking dramatic tableaux. Now, in the mall, it is

the visitors who are moved about by the escalators, becoming themselves actors in the tableau

'modem shopping'" (234). So it is, then, that a visitor can experience loss of the self's boundaries

here, but gain self there; participate in one place, and be passive in another. The mall is both

private and public space. In the mall one need not be a fixed, firm self: there is surrender

alternating with control. All of this contributes to an extraordinary richness of experience.

The exuberant excesses of malls can be thought of as forms of kitsch. Kitsch may be thought of as

a subversive art form. As Olalquiaga notes:

[K]itsch, generally understood as bad taste or a poor imitation of art and therefore always

banished to the margins of artistic practice, does exactly what that practice fears so much: it

gathers its motifs randomly and eclectically, fragmenting the cohesion and continuity so cherished

by high art, and then dares to re-present them in the most blunt, figurative, and sentimental ways,

much to the delight of its "uneducated" consumers and the distress of critics. Kitsch and

postmodernism's sharing of an irreverent recycling, a taste for iconography and the artificial, a

pleasure in color, gloss, melodrama, and overdetermination, lead me to believe that either

postmodernism is kitsch, kitsch is postmodern avant la lettre, or both. (xiv)

Shopping malls do not fare well under Olalquiaga's scrutiny. However, nowhere is this concept of

kitsch/postmodernism more finely represented than in the shopping mall where carefully

composed and lighted displays of consumer goods of varying sizes, colors, and textures subvert

traditional definitions of taste and art. These displays are then re-interpreted by the visitor for her

own purposes.

The mall contains raw art, art unfiltered and undistilled by the critics, unhampered by definitions

and official standards of taste. It is a quotidian place, a populist setting, a place shunned for the

most part by the media. This place is where the ordinary people are in their truest setting, for these

people in these settings represent their culture at its best and worst. In the mall's arteries its

visitors mingle with the culture's iconography; they read a choreographed code they instinctively

know as representing illusion and disillusion.

As a cultural code, as a postmodern pastiche, as a city, the mall's narrative represents both

contemporary cultural sensibilities and longings. In such a place one finds the material

representation of inarticulate desires. There is a vibrant almost adolescent quality to its

exuberance. It suggests, like adolescence, disruption and rebellion. Its dissolution of linear time

based on faith into compulsions of reinvention, and its questioning of the limits of the self in

space are vivid disruptions of systemic order in the sense that Jean Francois Lyotard described:

disruptions that create a hopeful anarchy.

Notes

[1] Andreas Huyssen in "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other" aligns mass culture specifically with the feminine and speculates accordingly that critical disdain of it is rooted in misogynism. Judith Williamson in "Woman is an Island: Femininity and Colonization" states that mass culture refers not to the objects themselves but rather the people who participate in it, which includes all of us--academics, too (100).

[2] Tanya Modleski in her introduction to Studies in Entertainment summarizes a 1970 essay by Hans Magnus Enzensberger of the Frankfurt School, "Constituents of a Theory of the Media," that makes this point (x).

[3] I owe much here to Rachel Bowlby's Just Looking, particularly the first two chapters, for many of these insights. Others, John Fiske for instance, have noted the shift from use-value to exchange-value. While Bowlby's primary intention is to link these her ideas about nineteenth and early twentieth century commerce to the naturalistic novel, she also connects the investment in visual commerce of the department store to the rise of the film industry a short time later. Films, of course, are a visual medium dependent on dreams and fantasies and their signification.

[4] They have become theme parks of consumerism, as Tracy C. Davis notes (11)--theme parks, as I will show, in which shoppers reappropriate the space from its capitalist intentions. The idea of theme park as a contemporary paradigm is the basis for the collection of essays edited by Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park.

[5] For a fine discussion of the "shopping-mall-as-cathedral-of-consumption" cliche see Fiske, 13-14. He points out that one of the differences between traditional religion and the religion of consumption is that in a traditional religion the congregation is expected to accept all the truths of the religion as they are revealed from above. While mass culture, as opposed to high culture, is designed and produced by the culture-mongers for the masses, 90 percent of new products fail to find their audience; no religion, he points out, could tolerate a 90 percent disapproval rating.

[6] So much distinction and exclusion, in short, so much racism, xenophobia, and general intolerance in the United States can be linked to an ostensible high regard for women and the need to protect them, from the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan to absurd extremes of security in the shopping mall.

[7] For a discussion of how the exoticizing of the Orient led to an objectifying fetishizing of women in the contemporary marketplace see Suren Lalvani's "Consuming The Exotic Other." This brilliant article shows convincingly that the Other--whether woman or Orient--is manipulated by existing power structures. The only challenge I make is that women--and others, for that matter-don't always succumb or surrender. I am suggesting in this article that there is plenty of resistance and reappropriation of both images and products. Much of mall culture is, if not actually underground, at least running contrary to expectation or commercial intentions.

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