Crisis of Meaning?

Kowinsksi gives us the mall experience as a first hand opinion editorial, reflection is balanced with expository information which results in a more tangible and coherent wholeness to the article and the subject of the mall. The majority of the other writings are relatively less embedded by voice and serve as a force to join the puzzling origins and evolution of retail space. The reading allows for the formation of more complete identities to attach to the characters involved in the mall management. Although containing less raw information than other pieces from the syllabus, this one allows a deeper understanding of the idea of experience, an increasingly necessary element within the retail management realm. Kowinski himself appears as ambiguous character, flaneur, writer, social satirist, and is not quick in the determination of a theory for the mall. The piece is more like Zola, the author winds us through a variety of spaces, into and out of the public realm, we gain a first hand understanding of the managerial tasks and personalities which dominate the spectacle. Less time is spent understanding the subjectivity of the mall visitor, perhaps because we have all played this roll and have been party to its depiction.

It was particularly telling to me when within the first article Kowinski presents malls Westmoreland and Greengate in opposition. As might be expected the opposition quickly crumbles and the distinction blurs. Although the tenant mix serves as temporary divide in the understanding of these places, the two malls fundamentally mean the same thing. The mall is the victim, itself victimizing and dangerous. It suffers a crisis of identity and placelessness. If we consider the mall as architecture, it has long been stripped or in search of an identity, a thing it has continuously failed to achieve in meaningful ways. Is the idea of identity itself archaic, moot? Dana Cuff remarked on the nature of societal niching in San Jose, where “everyone has several identities”; the white collars working in the business district living the extended lunch break life of adventurers in the Sierras. A condition as socio-economically restricted as the mall, yet the mall is an incredible source of homogenizing cultural forces where identity is created and nurtured en masse. Everyone receives about the same empty script of meaning in and through malls. Nothing attempts to locate us in physical space; ubiquitous, identical means of circulation, familiar conglomerated retailers, circuitous ambulatory patterns have an impoverished little to say about the human condition, and our identities both collective and individual. Forever cast in the drama of the mall, we must pretend in order to accept and live within the mall’s empty reality of show.