The consumer is the hero of modernity, the very embodiment of our modern liberal values of self-direction and freedom of choice, and hence its central figure. We built this towering figure a fitting temple; more than that, we built thousands of them at the staggering rate of hundreds a year, during their heyday. We built shopping malls.
And since then, they’ve collapsed. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that malls across America are leasing their vacant storefronts to data centers. Internet shopping and brick-and-mortar stores have been positioned in public discourse as engaging in a vicious death match for some time now, giving the news a certain sense of poetic justice.
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If malls are dying, then the internet is eating the decaying, hulking corpses of old consumption—the kind characterized by people physically maneuvering through space, together, as quickly or slowly as their feet will carry them—and sustaining itself inside them.
THE SPEED AT WHICH WE CONSUME HAS OUTSTRIPPED HUMAN MOVEMENT
George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has grown a patina of hokiness that can perhaps be chalked up, in part, to its focus on the mall as an object of criticism. Masses of shambling zombies shambling slowly and mindlessly in a space of consumption was an ample critique of consumer culture in the time of the shopping mall because it folded in the organization of space.
Malls are built for people to move through, ambling down unforeseen alleys and up in dizzying glass elevators into new, fantastic spaces of consumption. Now the dead malls of America are zombies, containing a viral host that maintains a style of consumption more amenable to our present tastes: immediate, unceasing, and pervasive.
Randall Park Mall, North Randall, Ohio. Image: Eddie S/Flickr
Consider political theorist Frederic Jameson’s description of consumption spaces, as characterized by the Eaton Center in Toronto and the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, in his 1988 essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society“:
…this new total space corresponds to a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hyper-crowd […] …a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body.
Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his book Consuming Life that modern consumption, perhaps in more abstract terms, is characterized by a desire for fluidity and mobility. The movement of goods, the generation of waste, the constant influx of the new. This is intimately tied to the state of our often fragmented time, fleeting relationships, uncertain futures.
“The life of the consumer, the consuming life, is not about acquiring and possessing,” he writes. “It is not even about getting rid of what has been acquired the day before yesterday and proudly parading it a day later. It is instead, first and foremost, about being on the move.”
The mall, then, would seem to be a perfect locale for the acting out of these impulses. And for a time, it was. But decades have passed since the shopping mall was the central locus of consumerist ideology, critique, and the act of shopping itself. What are we to make of this stunning reversal? The former chief space of movement and consumption is being rendered silent and still, filled will the endlessly humming and utterly inanimate appendages of a new kind of consumption.
The vivid metaphor provided by the serpentine husks of formerly bustling malls filled with the abstract still life portraits of new consumption—data servers—is enough to venture a guess: malls are too slow.
Mall at the Source in Long Island, NY. Image: Jtalledo/Wikipedia
That late capitalism is characterized by speed and liquidity is an idea that has been posited by Bauman, as well as theorists like Paul Virilio—who penned the excellent analysis of speed and philosophy, The Original Accident—and John Tomlinson. Tomlinson, in his book The Culture of Speed, referred to the age of digitally-facilitated consumption as “fast capitalism.” Cycles of consumption have sped up, and so has the pace of life, in the digital age, the argument goes.
If this is true, then no better analogy for the procession of fast capitalism exists than malls being turned into data centers. The speed at which we consume—at which we must consume, as the internet allows and compels us to shop with greater frequency (ads are everywhere and everything is an ad)—has outstripped human movement.
Who has the time to load the kids into a car, drive to the mall, and spend all those precious hours milling about? That old kind of consumption is a luxury we can no longer afford in the real currency of capital: time.
If, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in an apparent fit of prescience in “The Communist Manifesto,” “all that is solid melts into the air,” then we have learned that as some practices liquify, others are ossified. As shopping is lifted off its feet and into the ethereal realm of data and virtual spaces, its new physical backbone settles into its former domain. Like mollusks settling into a whale skeleton at the bottom of the ocean.
The shopping mall is dead, long live the shopping mall.
