"Once-Upon-A-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America"

"Once-Upon-A-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall of America" (March 1999)
By Jon Goss (from Annals)

Synopsis: Argues that the Mall of America "narrates out collective loss of a natural world of innocence and immanence, and promises restoration in a utopian community of consumption" (45). In fact a sense of loss and longing seems to subconsciously drive a lot of the fantasies found there. Goss spent ten days doing "semiotic reading and participant observation" at the Mall of America, mostly reading the mall as a text. Consumption depends on a faith that the objects possess some kind of power which will then be transfered to the purchaser - i.e. sexual desirability, prestige, status, etc - and this falls in line with the anthro concept of magic systems (56). He finds that the main tropes within the mall are: movement and mobility, memory and magic, nature, primitives, enchantment, and heritage. Says "the commodity is not a souvenir of the real experience of a past or distant reality, but a memento of the retail experience in which its possibility is imagined" (70). "The task is to recognize how the age-old fears of obsolescence - nature dies, children grow up, primitives are 'civilized,' and out heritage is lost - and dreams of immanence, live in the commodity aesthetic, not to eliminate them as so much 'false consciousness,' but to liberate them and live them more fully in really meaningful consumption" (72).

Interesting Specifics:

This article has a great bibliography.

This is one of my favorites - I love it!

Says the contemporary malls are what Foucault calls " 'heterotopias of compensation,' real and discrete 'counter-sites' where multiple images of ideal times and places combine to create an illusion of a world standing outside of everyday life" (45).

Shopping malls are examples of "hypernarrated spaces (Boyer, 1994), providing texts and contents for commemoration through which are narrated the loss and restoration of a thematic meaning" (47). It attempts to unite "individual biography with natural and cultural history" via the commodity (47). [This reminds me of the Buffalo Bill book on Janet's list - that BBWWS was combining personal and historical memory through the experience of the consumer spectacle].

Interacts With:

Jennifer Price (Flight Maps)
Walter Benjamin
Bakhtin's concept of the chronotype - "generic spaciotemporal structures where stories take place" (50)
In its view of objects as things imbided with meaning and embodying a sense of loss, this fits with most of the material culture books on Jeff's list, like The Meaning of Things, and On Longing, etc. Basically anything that looks at objects as having a special almost talisman-esque power that is passed on to its owner/possessor/giver.
This book does not engage with various debates over the artificiality of the mall or consumer culture, or with the hollow shallowness of consumer culture in general. Rather, it is asking us to look deeper into the meaning behind the objects and what kind of need they must represent.
Doesn't like the high culture critique of authentic vs. inauthentic experiences, and feel discussion of that (i.e. consumption as inauthentic) just reproduces the dichotomy what consumption revolves around (49).