Page 20 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 7

inside and outside, stranger and local, commerce and festivity, high and low.’
Stallybrass and White regard the market square and the fair as a hybrid place’, situ-
ated at the intersection or crossroad of economic and cultural forces, goods and trav-
ellers. In sites of consumption, dichotomies of inside/outside and commerce/culture
are systematically displaced, blurring cultural identities. Fairs and carnivals chal-
lenged prevailing orders in two ways: by opposing them from below, with profane
pleasures that undermined the high and serene, and from without, through the
intruding globalizing flows of foreign goods and merchants that disturbed local struc-
tures and introduced ‘a certain cosmopolitanism, arousing desires and excitements
for exotic and strange commodities’. 15 Benjamin found such desires in Paris and
Berlin, and they seem to persist in today’s world as well.
This connects to Hardt and Negri’s critique in Empire of the localist position that
wants to resist global capital through strictly localized struggles. Privileging the local
is based on a false dichotomy between the global and the local, and easily devolves
into ‘a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identi-
ties’. Hardt and Negri instead advocate a focus on ‘the production of locality, that is,
the social machines that create and recreate the identities and differences that are
understood as the local’. The most consequential tension is not between strictly local
subaltern communities and global capital, but rather between forms of globalization.
‘Globalization, like localization, should be understood instead as a regime of the
production of identity and difference, or really of homogenization and heterogeniza-
tion.’ 16
In the early twentieth-century department store, Mica Nava has found traits of a
commercial Orientalism, which offered women in particular potentially liberating
public spaces where identification with ethnic others was invited. Commercial
discourses necessitated positive representations of the distant Other, making
commodities from foreign cultures attractive for the Western consumer. ‘Desire for
the other, for something different, is also about the desire for merger with the other,
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about the desire to become different.’ Nava argues that foreign fashions transformed
the intimate spheres of the body and penetrated the home. As incorporated into the
culture, they signalled fusion and identification in a process leading to a destabiliza-
tion of identities and a domestication or ‘normalization of difference’ that is part of
the spread of a ‘dialogic imagination’. 18
There were many who saw shopping spaces such as department stores as key
symbols of modern urban life and privileged spaces of contemporary experience in
capitalist society. Among them were Émile Zola in his novel Ladies Paradise (Au
Bonheur des Dames, 1883), as well as Swedish authors like Sigfrid Siewertz in The Big
Department Store (Det stora varuhuset, 1923) and Karin Boye in Astarte (1931). All of
them had a department store as a prismatic focus, and used fashion and the modern
media including magazines and records as keys to understanding the ambivalences of
gendered identity constructions and power relations in capitalist modernity.
Through history, there has been a continuous development and accumulation of
new forms of shopping. To the early peddlers, fairs, shops and bazaars were added

Locating Media Practices 7