Page 194 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 181

This transparency of commodities is built into the architecture, with big glass
windows and mirrors that also make customers visible. This was however not the
whole truth in Solna Centre. There existed some winding alleys and hidden places
where it was easy to get lost. In our fieldwork, we experienced one such area as a
‘black hole’, into which the people we tried to track as they strolled through the
centre tended to disappear, apparently without a trace – making themselves invisible
not only for the panoptic strategies of marketing actors, but also for the ones of social
science.
Mediated forms of communication were also employed in the panoptic strategies.
Surveillance cameras were one example, though they were not yet very common in
Solna Centre when we made our study. A more indirect form was through credit
cards and other forms of registration of customer behaviour, enabling retailers to
customize their marketing and target specific individuals. Current developments in
networked microelectronics provide a radical expansion and refinement of such tech-
niques, as expressed in Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report (2002).
All these control mechanisms are designed to reproduce the centre as a safe envi-
ronment primarily for shopping. They also steer people in and out of the centre,
organizing its physical place as a social space that mirrors the dominating power rela-
tions in society at large. And individual visitors can usually only respond by accepting
and internalizing the power structures, or by developing certain marginal and secret
kinds of resistance. These latter are then of the evasive kinds that de Certeau
described as ‘tactics’, as when people look for interstices where they can enjoy their
own pleasures outside the dominant shopping order. Shoplifters are an extreme case,
but there are also groups of young kids or senior citizens who hang around forever,
transforming commercial sites into spaces for social intercourse. Solna Centre prefers
visitors who spend money and has problems with flâneurs who just wander around.
But according to its own figures, there are ‘too many’ who buy too little. Some cannot
afford to, others just happen to prefer to window-shop or look at people. Many
teenagers, senior citizens and unemployed belong to these categories. The ones you
do not see are the middle-aged career men who are too busy and the subcultural
bohemians who prefer less mainstream places.
This reminds us of how Walter Benjamin, inspired by the nineteenth-century
French poet Charles Baudelaire, described the flâneur as a male bohemian position
from which it seemed possible to experience and study mass life. The way in which
the flâneur moved around in cities was simultaneously a reflexive process character-
ized by a dense oscillation between strong presence in the here and now, swimming
with the crowds, and a more solitary, distanced observation. 17 ‘The flâneur still
stands on the threshold – of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him
in its power yet. In neither is he at home.’ 18

The flâneur seeks refuge in the crowd. The crowd is the veil through which the
familiar city is transformed for the flâneur into phantasmagoria. This phantas-
magoria, in which the city now appears as a landscape, now as a room, seems

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