They involve a double movement of recuperation and dispersion. Recuperation in the sense that malls provide a temporary unity for an otherwise chaotic, random, and undetermined field of activity. Except this time, they do it one better. Rather than flicking the dial, you take a walk from channel to channel as the neon stores flick by. A whole image-repertoire which, when successful, splays the body into a multiplicity of organs, all demanding to be filled.
Shopping malls are the real postmodern sites of happy consciousness.
Not happy consciousness in the old Hegelian sense of a reconciled dialectic of reason, but happy consciousness, now, in the sense of the virtual self. A whole seductive movement, therefore, between a willed abandonment of life and a restless search for satisfaction in the seduction of holograms. Or, is it that the self now is a virtual object to such a degree of intensity and accumulation that the fascination of the shopping mall is in the way of a homecoming to a self which has been lost, but now happily discovered. The postmodern self as one more object in the simulacra of objects. Shopping malls, therefore, as sites of possessive individualism par excellence .