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180 Consuming Media

specific territorial place. Second, they strive to control that place through sight:
panoptic efforts to survey, overview and predict. Third, they build upon specific types
of knowledge, linked to the power to supervise its own territory. (2) Tactics are the
way dominated groups oppose power by temporal and flexible counter-moves that
through unique actions make use of gaps, fissures and the unexpected to momen-
tarily transgress normative orders. Tactics are mostly unconscious and scattered acts
that arise in the fleeting moment, but they can also be developed in a reflexive way,
for instance by alternative social movements. According to de Certeau these tactics
are present when consumers appropriate media-produced texts and can be discerned
in what he calls ‘textual poaching’, in which ‘readers are travellers; they move across
lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across the fields
they did not write.’ 14
Panoptic practices abound in the shopping centre. Surveillance in the form of
cameras or security officers is an obvious example. It is motivated by a wish not only
to prevent theft and other crime against the shops, but also to make customers feel
safe. They want the centre to make sure that the threat of criminality from ‘other’
visitors is eliminated, and can often accept to pay the price of a certain sense of self-
surveillance, provided it is unobtrusive enough. The security officers safeguard both
the physical and the social borders of the centre. The social border is that ‘you mustn’t
shout out loud and disturb customers, you mustn’t steal, you must behave in a civi-
lized way’, as one security guard told us. In this work, they are supported by the local
regulations mentioned previously. The simplest punishment for misbehaving is to be
expelled from the centre, i.e. moved outside its physical boundaries, by being asked
to go away voluntarily, or by being physically removed. These physical boundaries
must however not be too marked, so that visitors are not scared away by an implied
sense of danger.
The panoptic topic is not only present in the work of Michel de Certeau or Michel
Foucault. 15 Benjamin, too, makes many references to the panopticon as a metaphor
for a modern visual regime. Mirrors are another aspect of surveillance that were
found everywhere in the Paris arcades: ‘One may compare the pure magic of those
walls of mirrors which we know from feudal times with the oppressive magic worked
by the alluring mirror-walls of the arcades, which invite us into seductive bazaars.’ 16
This mirror theme links consumption and commodity to desire and pleasure.
Mirrors expand and multiply the perspectives of a space, but they also enable surveil-
lance and control, both by staff and other visitors. Reflecting surfaces in every nook
and cranny signal that someone else might be watching you, just as you might be
watching them.
Yet another aspect of the panoptic strategy is the frequently used transparent archi-
tecture and design of the shopping centre, which avoids the dark and mysterious
spaces that so fascinated Benjamin. While older forms of sale hid commodities
behind doors and in boxes, forcing consumers to enter through doors and ask staff
for help to discover the hidden secrets, the twentieth century has privileged forms in
which all desired objects are immediately exposed on the surface to all who pass by.