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If the shopping mall is a text, and specifically an encoded text of a city, how shall we read it?
As a seemingly endless concatenation of crass, vulgar displays urging consumerism and overspending: as dystopia reified? To Joan Didion, for example, malls are "toy garden cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes..." (179). Or shall we see this text, these malls, as the representation of an idealized city, a contemporary fabrication of the mythical, utopian city? And is it a city advanced beyond words, a city relying on images to express the structure within, that urban structure which is, as Ihab Hassan once said, "invisible, imaginary, made of dream and desire, agent of all our transformations" (94)?
An understanding of this dependence on images is crucial to an appreciation of the traditional semiotics of the mall-as-city. Concurrent with the development of the mall, a concept with a coherent genealogy dating from the mid-nineteenth century, is the movement toward visual language as a prime transmitter of culture. In Western societies today, for instance, films, videos, and television are the primary bearers of narrative form. The panoply of the shopping mall provides an experience more active and direct than those filtered through a camera; it contains the visual media-the signs-for subjects to manipulate into the terms of their own texts. This manipulation results in a poetics and theatre emanating from the people, the shoppers, since anyone is free to play with the images and create a personal story, however brief, ephemeral, or surreal.
Cities, of course, can be read as texts. Their topographies reflect, among other things, the economic stratification of urban life. But just as communities and neighborhoods within cities bind, so do they isolate and limit: witness the desolation of so many of our inner cities. Boundaries among groups in cities tend to be rigid, the demarcations sharp and unyielding. The mall, on the other hand, with its recombinant properties, its reduction to basic forms not unlike those of abstract art, offers a more democratic hope and possibility, despite its connection to private enterprise. This democratic impulse owes itself in part to the ease with which the visual language is acquired and, secondly, to the fact that it is an aspect of mass...