Lifestyle Shopping

The Subject of Consumption

Rob Shields

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415060608
• eBook ISBN: 9781134927678
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. In contemporary shopping sites new modes of subjectivity, inter-personal relationships and models of social totality are being tried on, taken off and displayed in much the same way that one might shop for clothes. These are not the modernist spaces of goal-directed individuals and utopian projects. Rather it is a space of carnivalesque inversions of the present order of things. The multiple masks of the postmodern person who wears many hats in different groups and surroundings form a veritable dramatis personae. In such masks of the individual and the social world may be found a new spatialization and new intuitive perceptions of time and space. This representation of contemporary social life grows out of the work of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Maffesoli, Walter Benjamin and Mikhail Bakhtin. It is an attempt to take seriously the idea that we live in a postmodern consumer culture and to follow through the implications and possibilities of this idea. Cases are drawn from Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan and Singapore to illustrate the new intersections between people, mass culture and consumption.

1
SPACES FOR THE SUBJECT OF CONSUMPTION¹

Rob Shields

LIFESTYLE SHOPPING

This is a many-voiced text which attempts to look beyond sites and the physical architecture of shopping malls and city-centre redevelopments. Our interest is the interface between media images, ‘consumption sites’ where such images can be purchased as ready-to-wear ‘masks’, and the personalities and tribes that form a social ‘architecture’ of lifestyles and ‘consumption cultures’. Following in the tracks of Walter Benjamin’s study of the shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (1989), in these contemporary sites we find the implicated shadows of self, desire and consumption in amongst the goods on display and the crowds of people. Lifestyle Shopping is thus not intended as another celebration of the triumph of an ideology of lifestyles and marketing (Gardner and Sheppard, 1989) but a critical marking of the interdependence of the private spaces of subjectivity, media and commodity consumption, and the changing spatial contexts of everyday public life. This includes shopping malls which have developed as privately owned ‘public’ spaces for retailing, traditional public spaces such as markets, public buildings and monuments such as museums or heritage sites like Stonehenge, as well as the ephemeral ‘public’ space of the mass media.

Already broached under the rubric of ‘postmodernism’, changes in contemporary urban cultures have raised important issues which the authors in this volume do not intend to resolve. Rather we intend to set the agenda for debates in which closure cannot be evoked at this time. The following contributions are thus preliminary but are part of the larger postmodern project of remapping and rewriting the classical schemas of the human sciences, which located the subject in an abstract space of the bourgeois individual, de-spatialized and unrelated to place and context, and canonized in the positivism of social science.

The ‘postmodernism’ controversy lies at the intersection of contemporary cultural change and the political economy of commodity exchange. This debate concerns the changing role of consumption sites, such as shopping centres, market places, malls, museums and redeveloped downtown commercial areas with their pedestrian streets and interior arcades. The regional shopping centres and malls such as the MetroCentre, the West Edmonton Mall, Le Toison d’Or in Dijon or, indeed, local shopping centres, well established markets and the noon-hour shopping arcades being built in the London Docklands are significant as the ideal topoi in which the implications of new cultures, changing spatial practices and representations, may be seen.²

In general, the modernist separation of economy and culture has left little room for serious engagement with consumption practices. Critiques have been often motivated by the anomalous character of consumption which does not fit easily into the frameworks of productivist economics nor the Arbeitsgemeinschaft sociology of work cultures. Tomlinson, in his introduction to consumer cultures, has called the critiques ‘sad, dislocated, elitist, perhaps menopausal’ (Tomlinson, 1990:17). A serious engagement with consumption must be open to discovering that lifestyles and consumption cultures are not ‘confusions over class, regional, generational and gender identities’ (Tomlinson, 1990:18) but the emergence of new ‘identifications’. There is a need, therefore, to treat consumption as an active, committed production of self and of society which, rather than assimilating individuals to styles, appropriates codes and fashions, which are made into one’s own (de Certeau, 1984: 166). In the process, hegemonic systems find themselves undermined,

confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called ‘consumption’…characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation…, its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products, but in an art of using those imposed on it.

(de Certeau, 1984:31, italics added)

MALLS AND MARKET-PLACES

Every epoch has its cathedrals, monuments to the era, that come to signify or embody the cultural Weltanschauung. Buildings such as train stations or palaces, urban projects such as defensive city walls or pedestrian boulevards have direct impacts on behaviour and, indirectly have a discursive impact on thought and cultural practices. Architecture has a legitimating function as it attempts to express the essence of social needs resolved in a project and in so far as it influences norms of conduct. Like the castle or factory, the shopping centre and mall invite interpretation, being both structures and discursive statements. They can be studied for the cultural presuppositions and power relations which they impose by presupposition.

Culture has its contexts. It may vary over the course of a few city blocks, from site to site or from urban space to space. And, as culture varies, so this book sets out to argue that individual subjectivity may also be more fickle, more contextual than is readily acknowledged by modernists. In the essays that follow, Langman, for example, notes that

the relationships of social spaces and individual subjectivity remain little explored, especially in so far as elite power and privilege are secured by the everyday behaviours and habitual understandings that transpire in such spaces. Most critiques of subjectivity fail to contextualise its emergence in specific times and spaces.³

(Langman, 1992: n.p.)

The genealogy of the mall has two roots, the luxurious arcades built for the European bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century (see Benjamin, 1989; Geist, 1983) and the emporia or department stores in which mass produced household commodities and clothing became available in settings designed as palaces of consumption (see Chaney, 1991). Cast-iron engineering allowed new architectural effects such as multi-storey atria which amplified the effect of a spectacular, simultaneous display of a vast quantity of goods on offer. For a moment, shoppers, mostly women, were treated as royalty and could shop for bits of luxury (see Reekie, Ch. 9; Bowlby, 1985). To this background one might add a darker touch of the Foucauldian panopticon prison where visibility and surveillance reigned supreme.

While market-places are familiar to all, the shopping mall, especially as it is known in North America and more recently in Europe, is typically based on a galleria or arcade of boutiques and shops on one or more levels between two major stores which ‘anchor’ the dumb-bell-shaped plan by providing the functional poles of attraction for shoppers. A large food store at one end attracts shoppers from a large department store at the other end, or vice versa. The process ensures a steady flow of shoppers or even strollers, window shoppers and ‘hangers-out’, elderly people savouring the lively crowd, or adolescent ‘mall-rats’ and ‘mall-bunnies’ as one journalist called them (Kowinski, 1985). ‘Malls’ are typically more grandiose than shopping centres which, in their smaller ‘community’ versions, may be simple strips of small stores fronted by parking. In the malls, the plan becomes more complex (triangular, figure of eight), everything is larger, the architecture more monumental (expensive finishes such as marble, skylit arcades, soaring ceiling heights, dizzying mezzanines, sculpture, indoor tropical gardens), the major ‘anchor stores’ multiply and the functions increase with the addition of cinemas, hotels, zoos, recreation complexes featuring pools, ice-rinks, stadia, fairground rides and so on, office towers, conference centres, libraries, churches—in short almost any urban activity one can imagine. Malls now form the architectural typology for office buildings whose elevator lobbies grew first into atria then into malls (Shields, 1989), and international airport terminals where duty-free shopping is a major activity (Terminal 3, Toronto (Globe and Mail, 21 April 1991: C1– 8); Schiphol, Amsterdam). More insidiously, their ‘social logic’ of retail capital mixed with the social ferment of crowds of people from different backgrounds and all strata forms the model for conceptions of community and the public sphere which later emerge, concretized, in public projects such as museums, as Jill Delaney notes in Chapter 7.

The building itself is completed by the provision of parking for several tens of thousands of cars. In suburban locations, or areas where land was available when the mall was built, parking forms a great asphalt girdle completely encircling it. Such malls often lie at the intersection of major ‘feeder’ roads. The mall and intersection are typically ringed by apartment towers and schools sited near by according to modernist theories of urban zoning. In this configuration (a new and little-remarked upon urban morphology), the mall forms the centre of an urban constellation and a social community is born which appropriates the mall as a surrogate town square. As major users of such malls, the elderly walk from the nearby apartments and the adolescent ‘mall jammers’ migrate from schools in the vicinity to match wits with security personnel, in search of less controlled areas than the schoolyard. Others arrive by car or on buses which, symbiotically exploiting the conjunction of parking space and enclosed waiting areas patrolled by the mall owners’ security guards, serve the malls as nodes in the public transport system.

Ease of access, controlled climate, and reduced price based on a higher market volume are the functional attractions of the mall. But the articles in this book show that for all consumption sites, these benefits are quickly outstripped by the symbolic and social value of the mall as a site of communication and interaction. The broadening of access to credit through bank and store credit cards allows a wide cross-section of society to participate, with new marginals being created from those denied access, based on the flimsiest of judgements and reasoning, by security guards (private armies who ensure retailers conform and shoppers ‘behave’). As will be further argued, purchases often represent very minor expenditures (for example, a cup of coffee) and the spending of money is not required in any case. The mall’s benefits which derive from its internal environment and milieu are, like the market, a public good, ‘free’ to the individual user. It is here that groups meet, that face-to-face communication if not community is a practice for a huge number of people in the televisual age. This typology applies to a range of sites from shopping malls to outdoor markets and from Disneyland to ‘alternative’ festivals such as Glastonbury which Kevin Hetherington chronicles below. Langman (see Chapter 3) has remarked that,

Whatever one’s status or job in the world of work or even without job, there is an equality of just being there and looking at the shows of decor, goods and other people. Malls appear democratic and open to all, rich or poor, young or old. Age is often the only visible marker of difference given androgynous fashions, embourgeoisement of the masses and affluent slumming. This is the realm where the goods of the good life promised in the magazine ads and television commercials can be found.

(Langman, 1991:2)

CONSUMPTION SPACES AS TOPOI: SITES OF CULTURAL CHANGE

The significance of consumption for the economy and for the culture of people’s everyday lives is in change. Lifestyle Shopping focuses on cultures of consumption, and their impact on individuals and societies, in the great urban societies of the late twentieth century. The significance of these new consumption sites is not that their content of characteristic social activities and spatial practices is new. It is the combination of practices and behaviours kept apart according to classic portraits of modernity. In their totality, postmodern consumption sites are characterized by a new spatial form which is a synthesis of leisure and consumption activities previously held apart by being located in different sites, performed at different times or accomplished by different people. Modernism in this and many other ways is marked by what Max Weber described as the segmentation of culture and the separation of life into separate value spheres: culture differentiated from economy; both separated from religion. Most notably in the shopping mall, a new spatial and cultural form (Chaney, 1991; Simmel, 1950) results from a combination of two sets of spatial practices and understandings; practices which characterize the spatial performance typical of leisure spaces and spatial practices which characterize the performance of commercial sites.

Typical of such sites and areas are refurbished, ‘preserved’ and converted buildings, often factories or warehouses, those ‘back stages’ of earlier commercial activities.⁴ Often, buildings built for production activities have been converted to host consumption. For example, processing facilities such as a wholesale fish market may be converted into market buildings which combine eateries and leisure browsing in fashionable boutiques with traditional, more functional food-shopping activities (South Street Seaport in Manhattan).

In these sites, the new combination of those consumption activities long thought to be ‘ordinary’ with leisure activities marks a new phase in the recent history of urban centres and consumerism. Everyday shopping activities are foregrounded as if on a theatre stage, to be observed by passers-by who may vicariously participate in the bustle and lively activity of consumption without necessarily spending money. Attention wavers from rational economic activities: the site hosts a scene in which at least some of the people may take the opportunity to elaborate more complex social behaviours, to engage in more roles, even to contest the economic rationale and rationalized norms of the site. Hence the genesis of a site of cultural change, of social experimentation, a theatre of everyday life.

Again consumption, which might have once been regarded as merely part of the reproduction of labour, comes to share its spaces with leisure activities. Questions of inequality and power become complex. Discrepancies arising from economic class differences are met with compensating cultural inventions, lack of political power is displaced by superior ‘performance’ in a site which endorses a certain theatricality in which all participate at the same time as forming an audience. A spectacle, then, which is marked by the exchange of looks and gazes, complements the theatrical display of goods and commodities (Debord, 1970; see Nixon, Ch. 8).

In short, at the level of individual behaviour and group sociation (Simmel, 1950), changes in the built environment are accompanied by a stress on various forms of flânerie (loitering, aimless strolling) and leisure, a marked shift from the purposive behaviour which provided the raison d’être of the old consumption sites and the first malls. It is not a question of the built environment encouraging a new form of behaviour in a deterministic way, but the buildings are renovated to accommodate and host the new combination of leisure and consumption activities. Whether or not the foreseen and planned-for behaviour actually occurs is then a question of users’ appropriation of the site and buildings as a place for particular activities, a particular set of spatial practices. The sum of these contradictory and multiple practices are a postmodern spatial performance, for example, a ‘crowd practice’ which specifies the ‘form’ the various collective behaviours may take but is less specific as to its content.

Leisure spaces

The performances of leisure sites include spatial practices of displacement and travel to liminal zones, thresholds of controlled and legitimated breaks from the routines of everyday, proper behaviour (Zukin, 1991). Examples of this include the classic case of pilgrimages (Turner, 1979), eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century trips for a spa cure (Shields, 1991), and some aspects of contemporary tourism (Cohen and Ben-Yehuda, 1987; Urry, 1990). Liminal zones were once completely outside of the civilized realm of everyday community life. Deserts, wilderness, forests and the sea became zones of quests and searches for alternative social arrangements and new social statuses for individuals. These were also the zones of the excluded, shunned and leprous, zones of death. Initiatory rituals and rites of passage mobilize the symbolism and spatial practice of liminality to mark the symbolic death of one type of person and their social rebirth as a ‘new’ person of another rank and type. While in the liminal zone, even if it is simply a hut set aside for the purpose and symbolically consecrated as liminal, initiates are ‘betwixt and between’ social ranks and statuses, they loose their social identity (with major repercussions for their psychological self-identity which is entwined with social status, gender, class and so on) to be endowed with another one (Turner, 1979). Leisure spaces are controlled limen: like the classic cases, they are truly a threshold, but leisure spaces are an adjunct to everyday life—not fully differentiated, not fully liminal as the more uncompromising spaces just discussed. In this tension, leisure spaces are open to the liminal chaos which places social arrangements in abeyance and suggests their arbitrary, cultural nature (Shields, 1991).

Leisure and legitimation share the same Latin root, lex, law. As such, leisure spaces are zones of permitted, legitimated pleasure (Rojek, 1985), still very much within the grid of social control and repression (misunderstood by Lefebvre, the Situationists and the motivators of the May 1968 ‘festival’ in France). Rather than the complete suspension of morality one finds the lifting of the curtain of morals followed by embarrassed or guilty returns to moral codes.

None the less, it is important not to overstress social control in leisure spaces. A second factor operating in such sites is what Bakhtin calls the carnivalesque, the inversion of social...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• 1: Spaces for the Subject of Consumption
• 2: Watching the World Go Round: Atrium culture and the psychology of shopping
• 3: Neon Cages: Shopping for subjectivity
• 4: Stonehenge and its Festival: Spaces of consumption
• 5: The Individual, Consumption Cultures and the Fate of Community
• 6: Shopping for Women’s Fashion in Singapore
• 7: Ritual Space in the Canadian Museum of Civilization: Consuming Canadian identity
• 8: Have You Got the Look?: Masculinities and shopping spectacle
• 9: Changes in the Adamless Eden: The spatial and sexual transformation of a Brisbane department store 1930–90
• 10: Aesthetics of the Self: Shopping and social being in contemporary urban Japan
• 11: Notes from Storyville North: Circling the mall