Metaphysics of the Mall

Chanon Ross (Gifts Glittering and Poisoned) offers this insightful description of the way this works in a trip to the mall: “When a consumer enters the shopping mall, her senses are engaged by a panoply of stimuli designed to intoxicate. Images, music, scents, and products swirl together in a whirlwind of desire. The consumer does not have to want anything before entering the shopping mall because it is designed to cultivate desire for her, and it provides her with the products she needs to consummate the desire it has produced.”

The charge of energy that the shopper gets wears off. The products she bought get a little old, a little drab, a little familiar, losing their “gloss and sheen: “One day she will peer into her overflowing closet and conclude, ‘I have nothing to wear.’ Taken literally, this statement is nonsensical; what she really means is that the clothes she purchased in the past no longer provide her with the intensification of being that she craves. Purse in hand, she heads off once again to the shopping mall, and the cycle of de-intensification begins anew” (90).

This isn’t an accidental outcome. Marketers, advertisers, and shops want to cultivate precisely this cycle of desire, satisfaction, ebbing of satisfaction, renewal of desire. Ross quotes WTJ Mitchell, who argues that the pictures and images of advertises “have a tendency to swallow us up, or (as the expression goes) take us in. But images are also, notoriously, a drink that fails to satisfy our thirst. Their main function is to awaken desire; to create, not gratify thirst; to provoke a sense of lack and cravings by giving us the apparent presence of something and taking it away in the same gesture” (82).

Behind this is a concept of free choice that has detached itself from all ends and final goods. Ross quotes David Bentley Hart’s claim that “The market thrives on a desire that recognizes no commonality of needs, a desire that seeks to consume and to create an identity out of what it consumes, a desire that produces out of its own energy and indifference to a shared proportion of the good that might limit invention or acquisition. A desire that expands to the limits of which it is capable. . . . in our ‘society of the spectacle’ . . . , the open field where arbitrary choices may be made among indifferently desirable objects must be cleared and then secured against the disruptions of the Good; this society must presume, and subtly advocate, the nonexistence of any higher ‘value’ than choice, any truth that might order desire to a higher end; desire may posit, seize, want, not want – but it must not obey” (8).

The liturgy of shopping expresses the metaphysics of the mall.

(Photo by Svetlana Grechkina.)