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182 Consuming Media

later to have inspired the décor of department stores, which thus put flânerie to
work for profit. In any case, department stores are the last precincts of flânerie.
In the person of the flâneur, the intelligentsia becomes acquainted with the
marketplace. 19
The flâneur was certainly no man of open resistance, but a deviant individualist and
a border creature, and as such akin to the critical intellectual and a challenge to the
organized order of both the city and the shopping sites. ‘Preformed in the figure of
the flâneur is that of the detective,’ writes Benjamin, thinking of how Edgar Allan
Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle constructed detectives as similarly bohemian
outsiders. 20 The figure of the flâneur partly fits de Certeau’s description of resistant
tactics, but also hints at its limits. This chameleon evades certain urban control tech-
niques, but is every such avoidance really a resistance in Foucault’s terms? There
seems in any case to be a need for distinguishing kinds and levels of resistance along
this social and cultural front line.
Doreen Massey finds most other theoreticians guilty of privileging time over space
and misrepresenting space as lined up with structure and power. One of her main
targets is indeed Michel de Certeau, whose dichotomy of strategies and tactics is
accused of reproducing that of structure and agency, and projecting it onto that of
time and space. Massey prefers to free space from this link to structure, immobility
and power. Instead, she argues, ‘for time to be open, space must be in some sense
open too’ – a ‘simultaneity of open-ended multiplicities’ that is ‘as impossible to
represent as is time’. 21
This criticism can be supplemented in two directions. Firstly, it is problematic to
link power strategies to space and resistance tactics to time. In the previous two chap-
ters, we delineated a model where both time and space must be seen as developing
on several levels, from abstract to concrete, with a cultural level in between: narrated
or historic time mediating between cosmic and lived time, and inhabited or social
space mediating between geometric and lived space. For the panoptic power strate-
gies of the nineteenth century, there might possibly have been some truth in that they
tended to emphasize the spatial aspects of vision and geometry. But in late moder-
nity, surveillance and control are as much implicated in the temporal dimension, in
strategies for containing everyday time management and manipulating the forms of
historic remembrance that underpin constructions of collective identities. It is there-
fore better to release power/resistance from any fixed links to the space/time polarity.
Secondly, de Certeau’s and also Foucault’s concepts have invited certain cultural
studies scholars to reinterpret them in terms of rather fixed dichotomies, where a
closed camp of power is set against an equally reified and homogenized configuration
of popular resistance. We discussed this in Chapter 2, apropos John Fiske’s ideas of
the people versus the power-bloc. Another example in the same direction is when
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri oppose ‘the Empire’ to ‘the multitude’. 22 Many
share a wish and longing for a situation where all good resistance stands gathered
against all evil power, and revolutionary politics may well strive in that direction,