3/10/2010

GEOG 325 – Lecture 3 Outline

• walter benjamin’s arcades project • the mall The Mall • dead malls

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

German-Jewish Social Theorist

• Art and technology • Marxism and Psychoanalysis • Modernity and History • Hashish walter benjamin’s • Consumption arcades project

The Arcades Paris, late 19th C. rise of capitalism produced new spaces of consumption e.g. boulevards, cafés, arcades

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The Arcades Project •“Passagenwerk”, never published magnum opus, fragmentary writings, 1927-1940 • Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris duringgp( Second French Empire (1852-1870) • 36 categories e.g. "Fashion," "Boredom," "Dream City," "Photography," "Catacombs," "Advertising," "Prostitution," "Baudelaire," and "Theory of Progress."

"dream- and wish-image of the collective”

“a dialectical image” pointing in two directions: expressive of both oppression (by the ideology of consumption and liberation (a 24 hour utopia of Plenty) “Temples of commodity capitalism” the mall

The Mall: Malls R Us (2008) The Mall • Range of retail outlets and entertainment facilities within an enclosed space • Usually privately owned and managed • First enclosed mall built in Canada: Park Royal Shopping Centre, West Vancouver, BC.

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The Mall Colerain Avenue, Ohio, USA • Ubiquitous feature of the landscape of urban areas in both developed and developing countries

• Understood as theaters of a “retail drama” (Hopkins, 1991: 270), leisure spaces, tourist attractions, sites of collective dreaming, pleasure, and diversion, and strolling for the flâneur (stroller).

The Mall • Representational spaces of spectacle, fantasy, and escapism • Production of nostalgia (for past places and Lougheed Mall, Burnaby times and the ‘authentic’), carnivalesque, Metrotown, Burnaby magic and fantasy • Purvey myths of “elsewhereness” (Hopkins, 1990) that manipulate time/space to evoke idealizations of other places beyond

Park Royal, North Mall, W. Vancouver everyday life Yaohan Centre (八佰伴中心), Richmond

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Goss’s Mall Goss’s Mall • “Modernity is the contradictory • “Depth ontology” (p.48) Truth = hidden structures experience of a nostalgia born of • Jouissance = Enjoyment alienation from an authentic nature, Self, • Eros = Life forces of love and other, and anticipation of the • Kinesthetic = beauty of movement development of technological and social • Allegory = MtiMysterious para bl(t)ble (story) means to realize ‘immanent totality’ • Symbolic Order = Cultural rules/customs (Lukacs 1971) [coincidence of personal • The Real = sublime phenomena beyond language desire and cosmos]” (p. 48). e.g. anxiety, enjoyment • False consiousness = delusory state of mind caused by capitalism

Dawn of the Dead (1974, 2004)

dead malls

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conclusions

• Walter Benjamin’s work on European consumption has influenced research on malls • Geographers have focused on the mall as a space of commodified space offf fant asy, nost al gi a, and playfulness, as well as security and control • The 2000s have witnessed the death of malls throughout North America

next lecture

“Food”

6