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170 Consuming Media

to 1945), through ‘state-controlled capitalism’ (up to the 1980s) to ‘globalized neo-
liberal capitalism’. Since 2000, the centre has been owned by the Dutch company
Rodamco, which owns shopping centres all over Europe. The political efforts in the
1960s and 1970s to regulate and counteract the influence of the market forces on the
city centre as a public sphere have weakened, but still remain active in the political
life of the city.
Just as economic and political power is spatially ordered in the centre, so is
symbolic power. For example, although the shopping centre at large appears as a place
of popular culture, distinctions between high and low culture are not quite absent.
The centre is decorated with art and references to high culture are built into its archi-
tecture, borrowing and transferring the uplifting flavour of celebrated high cultural
standards to the overall popular image it displays of itself as a place where everyone
can ‘feel at home’. Solna Centre is a place where popular culture reigns and high
culture is marginalized, but where the esteem of consecrated art values can at certain
points be used to legitimate and affirm its own existence. Many examples of value
conflicts between high and low culture can also be found within each of its media
shops, in the hierarchical ordering of books, records and videos, and in various taste
tensions between different categories of customers and staff.
When people encounter each other as sellers and buyers, the dominant forms of
power and resistance tend to be economic. Such encounters are guided by what
2
Habermas calls strategic as well as communicative action. Basically, seller and buyer
pursue oppositional strategic or goal-directed interests, but at the same time draw on
a common stock of communicative competence. Mediated by money, the encounter
between seller and buyer also functions as the most concrete encounter between
systemic market forces and the understanding-oriented interaction of the lifeworld.
It is a sphere of action where economic macro-powers and everyday cultural practices
linked to the micro-powers of the lifeworld converge. It is important for sellers and
buyers not to violate the symbolic order of everyday life. They are bound to both
3
conceal and accept each other’s strategic interests and actions. Their relationship
therefore rests on a delicate balance between trust and distrust. The latter kind of
suspicion makes customers interpret sellers critically and is thus a form of potential
resistance in shopping customers’ rules of conduct in relation to sellers, or in a more
general way to the consumer market’s offerings and advertising. This mistrust can be
grasped by ethnographic studies, but is rarely expressed in explicit acts of contesta-
tion. Resistance may also manifest itself in many other ways in media consumption,
for instance in the manner in which audiences more or less consciously question or
dismiss the ideologies diffused through symbolic media forms and contents. The
popular culture of consumption is no pure product of ‘the culture industry’, or of ‘the
people’, but the outcome of their interaction, in an ongoing dialectics of power and
resistance.
In a specific social setting like Solna Centre, economic, political and symbolic
power-resistance formations intersect in multifarious ways. The following three
sections will exemplify some such struggles that came to the fore in our ethnographic