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6 Consuming Media

a constant and precise contact with the emerging, due to the exceptional scent
of the female collective for what awaits in the future. In its newest creations,
each season offers some secret semaphore of coming events. The one who could
read them would know in advance not only of new currents in art but also of
new codes of law, wars and revolutions. – Herein lies no doubt the greatest
incitement of fashion, but also the difficulty in making it productive. 12

This is true for fashion, but crucial also for the popular culture of the media that flow
through shopping centres.

ECONOMY AS CULTURE
Benjamin argues that:

today arcades dot the metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil
remains of a vanished monster: the consumer of the pre-imperial era of capi-
talism, the last dinosaur of Europe. On the walls of these caverns their imme-
morial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the
most irregular combinations. A world of secret affinities opens up within: palm
tree and feather duster, hairdryer and Venus de Milo, prostheses and letter-
writing manuals. 13

The economic world of commerce asks for cultural interpretation: ‘These items on
display are a rebus’, and can be read if one discovers its secret codes.
It is this challenge that the field of cultural studies takes seriously for contempo-
rary times. There is often said to exist an ongoing culturalization or aestheticization
of the economy, parallel to an economization or commercialization of culture. The
confluence of these two trends necessitates renewed discussions of the strained rela-
tions between the market, the state and a life world split between public and private
spheres. Studying places where communication and consumption intertwine is one
option. ‘Marx lays bare the causal connection between economy and culture. For us,
what matters is the thread of expression. It is not the economic origins of culture that
will be presented, but the expression of the economy in its culture.’ 14 Benjamin’s
ambition to connect a phenomenology of inner, personal experiences with material
and political-economic structures remains a key task for today’s cultural studies of
consumption.
Marketplaces have always been sites of ambivalence and ambiguity. In The Politics
and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White describe the marketplace as at once
a bounded closure and a site of open commerce, ‘both the imagined centre of an
urban community and its structural interconnection with the networks of goods,
commodities, markets, sites of commerce and places of production which sustain it’.
The market is the epitome of local identity even as the trade and traffic of goods from
elsewhere unsettle that identity. Their description of pre-capitalist fairs applies well
to contemporary consumption sites: ‘At the market centre of the polis we discover a
commingling of categories usually kept separate and opposed: centre and periphery,