Exceptional Sales

The alluded fictional developer logic responsible for the Bonheur de Dames serves as a precedent for the use of commercially driven building strategies where economic, political and spatial effects occur in concert. A facsimile of le Bon Marché (“the good deal”), the Ladies Delight is as much a political force as commercial paradigm. Mouret, like the executives in control of the Golden Resources Mall in Beijing, is attempting to captivate and literally capture an emerging middle class, demanding fees which require a degree of seduction to extract, and creating jobs which subjugate the working class.

These commercial fields, should be recognized as a zones d’ attentes, spaces of legal exception created and supported by the centrifugal economic pull of the super mall. Zola suggests suspicious dealings with regards to the origins of the “oriental” foreign goods, “mosques ransacked” and “palaces emptied” of their craft antiquities (87). More important than the source of the store’s goods are the conditions which draw humans into the ever densifying machine. Those arriving in search of economic opportunity, real or imagined, are quickly pulled to the phantasmagoric lure which seems to satisfy a host of emotional and economic necessities. A prospective inhabitant of the city, Denise procures a citizenship by way of consigning her being to the commercial organism. For Denise there is an illusion of choice, she even has the advantage of reference, which quickly evaporates thanks to the same force which will begrudgingly offer her employment and room.

The Bonheur could be understood as what Hyndman and Mountz describe as exclusive geographies, where a higher governing power is absent or entangled within the governmental/commercial hybrid which mutates and annexes more space, power and individuals. The Bonheur, though less overtly, operates like the contemporary French international airports where foreign refugees are detained by a mixture of commercial and political authority. The store does not ensure a standard of welfare or process of law within its enclosure, employees are paid enough to keep them stationary and dependent. Internal competition, disguised as self determination, is created to enhance sales at the cost relationships and bodily strain. Denise and those like her are quite stuck in vicious machine, collectively supporting the unilateral hegemonic power which ensnares them. “Here there was the continuous purring of a machine at work, the customers shoveled in, heaped in front of the displays and dazzled by goods, before being hurled against the cash desks. And it was all organized and regulated with mechanical precision, a whole nation of women caught up in the power and logic of the turning cogs” (Zola 16).