“The Last Stop of Desire”: Roland Barthes Goes Shopping

Each separate counter was a showplace of dazzling interest and attraction. She could not help
feeling the claim of each trinket and valuable upon her personally and yet she did not stop.
There was nothing which she did not long to own. The dainty slippers and stockings, the
delicately-frilled skirts and petticoats, the laces, the ribbons, hair-combs, purses, all touched
her with individual desire…

                    Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie


    In this essay, I try to understand some of the pleasures of shopping in relation to Barthes’s ideas in S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text about plural texts, looking at the activity of shopping as a particular example of a plural text, paying attention to the history of shopping, the relationship between women and shopping, shopping as an example of process as opposed to stasis, and the idea of the active shopper as a blank space or empty page to be ‘filled in.’ This will also involve consideration of the activity of shopping as a network of analogies and affiliations in relation to Barthes’s version of the plural text in S/Z as a collocation of ideological values, ontologies and statements. In this light, it seems also important to consider some of Barthes’s ideas about encratic language, and to think about the language of advertising and consumption and the typography of the marketplace as examples of encratic lanaguage-that is, language produced and spread under the protection of power.
    Finally, I want to discuss the activity of shopping as a text of jouissance. While many writers and critics confess to feelings of angst and paranoia in the marketplace, others, particularly the Futurist writers of the early twentieth century, have regarded shopping as a magical, sublime homecoming to a rediscovered self. It is in this context that I want to examine a particular festival shopping center, London’s Covent Garden Market, and to think closely about the relationship between Covent Garden, ideas about packaging and surface, and the many kinds of pleasures which are located in the popular process of consumption.
    The activity of shopping provides a good example of what Barthes refers to in S/Z as a ‘plural’ (or “starred”) text (13-15). A plural text is the kind of text to which we can gain access by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared as the main one. To put it another way, the plural text is the kind of text that can never be seen in its entirety as the whole text. Indeed, this kind of text is separated from all the conventional image-systems of language inasmuch as it is itself composed by all that is barely tolerated or bluntly rejected as insignificant, ex-canonical, and so on by conventional theories of literature and linguistics.
    In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes suggests that it is not necessary for a non-linguistic text to be analyzed linguistically, or in terms of one single method that is given priority over all others. As an alternative to analyzing the text in terms of language, Barthes suggests an analysis of the text in question in terms of the semiotic substance of several kinds of criticism (psychological, psychoanalytical, thematic, historical, structural), and it will then be up to each kind of criticism to come into play, to make its voice heard, which is the hearing of one of the voices in the text. Thus, a plural text such as shopping, with its vast range of commodities on display, its ongoing process of movement and renewal, may be re-read several times in order for each voice to make its appearance.
    One entrance to the plural text of shopping might be through an analysis of the modern social history of shopping, since everything is, of course, historical. Nonetheless, although much work has been undertaken on the history of shopping, there is a very obvious and important way in which the concept of history is not especially relevant to this activity. Because chain-store shopping centers and chain-stores within shopping malls are virtually identical, and because cycles in their trade names, chain-store development and advertising appear to have virtually no historical memory, discussions of the role of the shopping center in national life often lack a historical dimension. Moreover, the very application of historically ‘proven’ and allegedly universal concepts such as permanency, durability and perennity seem to have little relevance to recent cultural phenomena like the ephemeral, disposable culture of the masses.
    On the other hand, it could be logically argued that this appearance of ‘having no past’ is deceptive, and all part of the illusion that consumer capitalism wants to generate. Mall-scale shopping could only be said to be historically irrelevant if one buys the illusion, and the ideology underpinning the illusion, of consumer culture. Shopping does of course have a history (see Haug’s Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, Benjamin’s Arcades project and so on), the same way that everything has a history. While I intend to suggest that for a variety of reasons history has in fact little relevance in a discussion of the contemporary shopping environment and consumer culture, history does seem highly relevant in the discussion of specifically located shopping arcades.
    A number of fashionable ‘reconstructed’ British shopping centers, for example, not only share important structural similarities with American-style mall complexes, but function at the same time as historical landmarks with a unique and specific cultural and architectural history. The tradition of such loci is closely linked to the development of the ‘spectacle of goods’ arcade and the history of authenticity and artifice, as found in works such as Thomas Richards’s The Commodity Culture of Victorian England, and Anne Freiberg’s Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern.
    A perhaps more appropriate way in which we could gain access to the plural text of shopping is through an examination of the relationship between women and shopping, since it is women who are primarily defined as consumers. This is a line of reasoning many feminist writers on shopping have taken up. For instance, in her book on the department store entitled Just Looking (1985), Rachel Bowlby shows how the psychoanalytic construction of femininity is very much like that of shopping, in that during the process of shopping, the female shopper is being looked at (or ‘consumed’), while looking at and consuming commodities for sale, and playing games with her own self-image. According to Bowlby, therefore, a woman’s sense of self is of a self that is consumed, while she herself is consuming:

    As the proportion of goods sold in stores rather than produced at home increased, it was women,
    rather than men, who tended to have the job of purchasing them … The superfluous, frivolous
    association of some of the new commodities, and the establishment of convenient stores that were
    both enticing and respectable, made shopping itself a new feminine leisure activity (27).


    On both counts then-the increase in women’s purchasing responsibilities and the potential for some of these for extra excursions into luxury-it follows that the organized effort of ‘producers’ to sell to ‘consumers’ does to a large measure take the form of a masculine appeal to women. Moreover, to ‘go shopping’ originally invoked a relative emancipation in women’s active roles as consumers. Given the traditional confinement of women to the domestic sphere, shopping did at least originally take women out of the house to urban areas formerly out of bounds, as labor saving equipment made housework more manageable. In today’s increasingly complex society, the traditional association between women and the marketplace has become more subtly codified. Even within marriage, women are more often financially independent and in control of a separate income. But this discourse of power and independence may be illusory. The relation of female ‘spending power’ to female ‘earning power’ is a critical question, as Anne Frieberg has acknowledged:

    Shopping is more than a perceptual mode involving the empowered choices of the consumer, it-
    quite simply, quite materially-requires money. A credit-card economy may encourage the
    fantasy of virtual ‘spending power,’ but this imaginary diversion has a price. Veblen read female
    consumption as a ‘vicarious’ sign of a husband’s or father’s wealth. Today’s female consumer
    may be enacting a postmodern version of an equally ‘vicarious’ empowerment; instead of
    deferring payment to husband or father, she defers payment to the bank (118).



    However, while it would be of course wrong to suggest that men and women are equal in terms of their engagement in shopping behavior, more men now participate in shopping as a leisure-time activity (particularly in shopping malls) than would ever have dreamed of doing so in the past: gender roles are altering in line with the economics of consumer capitalism. A number of consumer specialists have asserted that husbands increasingly participate in the shopping chores, and that men are therefore involved in brand choice in a way that has not been considered to date. Consequently, the standard, statistical, market-based analysis of the relationship between women and shopping has become a somewhat outmoded and possibly even invalid route of access to this shifting plural text.
    According to Barthes, another typical condition of the plural text is that it involves a condition of process, movement, change and indecision without ever stopping for a static appraisal of connotation and meaning. “‘Text’ dissolves ideologies and power systems; the plural codes are forces which ‘take over’ like imperial invaders” (21), writes Barthes in S/Z. It is no coincidence that today’s shopping malls and arcades with their escalators, mirrors, fountains, stage-lights, glass fronts and rocket-ship lifts stand as the ultimate symbols of shopping’s future, since they proclaim that it is in the city itself that everything happens first. The relevance and effect of this illusion of futurity seems to depend on a constant schema of updating, reconstruction, movement, making and process rather than the finished product. Or, to put it another way, consumption has come to represent movement, activity and energy being injected into a state of torpor.
    In S/Z, Barthes analyzes the consumer as an empty page to be written on and filled in by the experience of the plural text, which represents a kind of homecoming. Barthes characterizes the consumer of the plural text in S/Z as a prescribed vessel filled with a series of codes, words and languages to which certain aspects of the text correspond, a view which depends on regarding the consumer of the text not as a unique individual, but as a “plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost (whose origin is lost)” (10). Where M.M. Bakhtin thirty years earlier regarded the text as a composition of heteroglottal layers and codes, Barthes in 1973 considered not only the text but also the reader or consumer of that text as similarly composed of a series of heteroglottal layers and codes. He suggests that all texts depend on a series of codes we have in us anyway, and to which we respond. Indeed, the visual consumption of the commodity is so much a part of our daily landscape that we do not consciously notice how meanings are inscribed in our acts of consumption.
    This version of the shopper as an empty page to be inscribed or ‘filled up’ by the plural text of the shopping process is devastatingly summed up by a photo by Barbara Kruger (called “Untitled”) which presents that abstraction of self and reality in consumer society with the image of a white hand with thumb and forefingers grasping a red credit-card like item whose motto reads “I shop therefore I am.” Kruger’s photo captures the double nature of commodity fetishism as it informs both self and activity. The reduction of being to consumption coincides with the encratic mixture of articles and advertisements in the abstraction of the shopping process, as in the style magazines described in chapter 2.
    Part of the mysticism of the shopping process is that the crowds, density, shop-fronts, glass windows and colorful displays seem to provide a network of correspondences and connections whose synthetic quality is somehow both emotive and functional at the same time. In his book Soft City, for example, Jonathan Raban notes that each London shop is a symbolic reinterpretation of an ideology, or a lifestyle. Raban’s typical Londoner locates a form of artistic beauty in the very idea of all the frenetic movement that consumer culture demands.
    No one feature of this living urban collage seems so alive, or offers such a catalogue of variety in its signs and synecdoches, as the shopping mall. In this, the very heart of consumer culture, the collage of the city springs most actively to life-a process analyzed most subtly by Walter Benjamin in the Arcades project and in his seminal discussion of collage in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In David Harvey’s book The Condition of Postmodernity, Harvey seeks to correct many of the ahistorical, implicitly reactionary tendencies manifested in a lot of much earlier postmodern theory of consumer culture. In doing so, he analyzes the expansion of media and communication in western culture that appears to have resulted in the seeming compression and reduction of space and time. One aspect of this phenomenon, for example, is the ‘internationalization’ of products on display in the market place or shopping mall: gourmet French cheeses are now widely sold across America, and a British-style pub will often offer German, American, Australian and Dutch beers on tap. Every market is now much more international than it was twenty years ago. David Harvey explains that “….spaces of very different worlds seem to collapse on each other, much as the world’s commodities are assembled in the supermarket and all manner of subcultures get juxtaposed in the contemporary city” (46).
    This vast network of analogies and affinities which characterizes the plural text of the shopping center has been the inspiration for a great deal of modernist art, especially pop art, whose appropriation of the language of advertising and consumption is an attempt to eliminate distinctions between high and mass, between the culture of the gallery and the culture of the market place. For example, Futurist writer Filippo Marinetti testified that his art drew its vitality from modern city life, with its “ever-vaster gradation of analogies” and “ever-deeper and more solid affinities, however remote” (85). For neo-Futurist writer Jonathan Raban, consumer culture is a “labyrinth,” honey-combed with such diverse networks of social interaction, oriented to such diverse goals, that it becomes a maniacal scrapbook filled with colorful entries that have no relation to each other (40). In other words, the modern shopping mall obliterates the distinction between construction work and sculpture, between collage and modern life, between process (or, in shopping, transaction) and finished product (or purchased commodity).
    David Harvey describes consumer culture as “an encyclopedia of styles” in which a sense of hierarchy or even homogeneity is in the process of dissolution (301), and in which distinctions between high and mass, or market place and gallery, are finally obliterated. For Harvey, the shopping center is far more than the shops past which Raban’s latter-day flâneur walks; it is a complex synecdoche for levels of wealth and lifestyles. Harvey describes these advertisement hoardings, window displays and shop fronts as examples of “miniature escape fantasies” (“this, it seems, is how we are destined to live, as split personalities in which the private life is disturbed by the promise of escape routes to another reality”) (301).
Like Marinetti’s discovery of a panoply of secret connections, affinities and analogies in the heart of the city, Harvey’s vision of modern culture as composed of video screens, television commercials and print advertisements also draws on the notion of modern consumer culture as a kind of collage or catalogue. And at the 1986 Trade Fair in Milan-the city, incidentally, which inspired Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto-Umberto Eco observes how consumer goods “become a series of pure connotative signs, at an emotional fever pitch, each commodity losing its concrete individuality to become so many acts in an anthem to progress, a hymn to the abundance and happiness of consumption and production” (184). No wonder, then, that the plural text of shopping, with all its neon light displays, video screens and electric billboards, its vast area of commercial naming and lettering, should be located by a number of recent artists and writers as the center of ‘reality’ for the postmodern self.
    In Mythologies of 1957, Barthes analyses how the language of money and commodities has become an all-encompassing signifying system, the very texture of everyday forms of ideology. In “The Rhetoric of the Image,” he shows how advertising images, which constitute a large proportion of the shopping mall’s collage, are themselves a collocation of ideological values, ontologies and statements. In Mythologies, he deconstructs the ideology behind the semiology of consumerism-that is, the signs in shop window displays (described by Marinetti in 1912 as “those beautiful, brand new toys for thoughtful families”) (85), analyzing the bizarre, often dramatic advertising scenarios featuring soap powders and cleaning liquids that liberate the freshness by symbolically “killing” the Enemy: dirt.
    The typography of the shopping center, advertising and the marketplace are full of examples of what Barthes in Mythologies refers to as encratic language-that is, language produced and consumed under the protection of power, the language of repetition. Much later on, in The Pleasure of the Text of 1973, he refers to “the bastard form of mass culture” as “humiliated repetition: content, ideological schema, the blurring of contradictions-these are repeated, but the superficial forms are varied: always new books, new programs, new films, new items, but always the same meaning” (40).
Earlier, Barthes had implied that all official institutions of language repeat: “schools, sports, advertising, pop songs, news and so on all continually repeat the same structure / meaning / words” (40), suggesting that the stereotype is a political fact, a major figure of ideology (Peter Handke’s play Kaspar is all about this). Elsewhere, however, Barthes refers to “the bliss of the stereotype,” suggesting that repetition can be responsible for creating happiness, and he refers to a number of ethnographic examples such as totemic chanting rites and Buddhist nembutsu. Perhaps a more interesting example would be the pleasure a baby feels in repetitive games (the fort/da scenario described by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”). Here, however, there is quite clearly a darker side to the repetition ritual, in that the child is seeking to abreact a painful memory. Freud went on to use this style of trauma to develop his concept of the Wiederholunszwang, or ‘compulsion to repeat,’ in relation to the death drive.    
    One of the most interesting and important ways in which shopping center aesthetics have been acknowledged is in the appropriation of typography as collage, first utilized by the Futurist movement in the early twentieth century. The Futurists tended to transcribe their poems, diktats and political manifestos in experimental texts that frequently involved huge gaps, spaces, omissions, the absence of punctuation, large letters for extra emphasis, small letters in the same words as capitals confused with subheadings and numbered lists, vertical printing, onomatopoeic devices, white spaces and attacks on syntax. As Maria Drudi Gombillo and Teresa Fiori explain, Futurist artists deployed the typography of the early capitalist market place:

    The placard, the sandwich man, the poster, the sign, the advertisement, the leaflet … Since
    advertising’s intentions were thought to be vulgar, its means could be untraditional. Garishness
    of color, juxtapositions of boldwood typefaces, the use of illustrative arts … the mix of fonts,
    the stridency of exclamation points and under-scorings, all these could be employed … to
    advertise a product and sell it. Typographic novelty began … in the marketplace, catching the
    accelerated pace of an urban culture (294-5).


    Later, Andy Warhol and the pop artists of the 1950s and 60s were to utilize the slogans, jingles, graphics, typography and commercial style of consumer culture within their art, constructing collages that depicted an active, functional mélange of consumer information. On another level, Barthes notes in The Pleasure of the Text that encratic lanaguage is essentially designed to keep “…desire within the configurations of those upon whom it acts” (40). The encratic language of advertising and consumption and the typography of the marketplace both help to compose the configurations of desire encoded by the plural text of shopping, as the work of the Futurists and pop artists seems also to point out.
    There are, of course, a number of reasons why people shop. For those who are interested only in ‘hanging out’ in shopping malls, viewing the different range of good on offer, playing games with their own self-image and so on, then the pleasure to be obtained from shopping is possibly similar to that which Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text describes as jouissance, something he advocated, and believed to be inherently good. At other times, however, the shopper is liable to get caught in the psychological double-bind enforced by the encratic language of the shopping mall. Many of those who are interested in the shopping process have pointed out that encratic language creates this psychological double-bind by promising to put back by means of signifiers (in other words, commodities) what has been taken away from the consumer at the level of the signified (that is, his or her sense of potency). Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, translated into English as Arcades Project, bears directly on this paradox. As Benjamin helpfully points out, this simultaneous arousal of desire and frustration occurs via commodity fetishism. This pleasure-frustration paradox appears to be resolved by recourse to these legitimate, or consumer, objects of desire, but the lack of subjectivity intimated in the pleasure of the immediate purpose can only ever be fleetingly achieved.
    Many people who write about shopping are critical of the fantasy utopia it offers people. Susan Willis, for example, in A Primer for Daily Life, sees the forces of capitalism as conspiratorial because they put profits before individuals. She points out that the distinction Nancy Reagan’s anti-drug campaign teels us to make between good and bad commodities is a hypocritical one:

    Commodity culture tells us to say yes to everything. To question a commodity strikes at [its]
    fundamental logic. The admonition against drugs precludes the possibility of raising awkward
    questions about all the other commodities defined as acceptable. We need not question what
    we consume. The supermarket has done this for us (146).


    Wills regards consumption as false consciousness, a sign of commodity fetishism. She characterizes the attractive image of commodities as capital in its hypothetical utopian form, promoting the false notion of democratized consumption. She argues that the ideology of consumer society “defines atomization as strength, while bonding with others to facilitate social reproduction is a sure sign of weakness and insufficiency” (176).
    This negative appraisal of shopping and commodity consumption is perhaps the most understandable reaction to the awe and intimidation engendered by the confusion and alienation of the shopping mall. A George Romero film, Dawn of the Dead, features zombies taking over a shopping center, a scenario depicting the worst fears of culture critics like Clement Greenberg who, feels Tania Modleski, have long envisaged the will-less, soul-less masses as zombie-like beings possessed by the alienating imperative to consume. Incidentally, Dawn of the Dead became a midnight favorite in cinemas in shopping malls all over America-a cult symptomatic, Modleski believes, of the masses revelling in the very demise of the culture they appear most frequently to support.
    Possibilities for commodity consumption in the European marketplace meet the tremendous scale promised by the American mall only in a few special locations. These distinct shopping environments are rather more varied and diverse, in history and structure, than their U.S. counterparts and equivalents. Harrods and Selfridges in London, for instance, are both ‘department store’ environments, somewhat different from the more ‘self-conscious,’ constructed environments of outdoor or indoor shopping centers or enclosed shopping malls, and the historically constructed shopping environment of Covent Garden. As Meaghan Morris eloquently demonstrates, each shopping locus looks and operates according to its own particular dynamic, and while similarities exist in terms of the display of goods and so on, shopping behaviors in each style of location will probably differ.
    Nevertheless, any consumer activity on this kind of vast scale must inevitably produce a sense of the individual’s alienation and confusion, a feeling of the self being lost in a conspiratorial fever of newness and the consumer gaze. The concrete reality of the mass and the sameness of the crowd in such places often result in what is described as a sense of lack, of loss, of absence. In Florida, as Kroker, Kroker and Cook point out, most of the shopping centers-the aptly named Mercado, for example-possess the layout of a “charming village setting” while containing, of course, the produce of an international marketplace. Kroker, Kroker and Cook observe that there are so many of these pseudo-village “settings,” Floridians have no need for villages or towns, or even cities. The whole of south Florida, they point out, has become a series of suburbs, euphemistically dubbed “metropolitan complexes,” connected by freeways (110). This alienation of the individual by the urban landscape has been the cause of great outrage. “The more you consume,” wrote the Situationiste Internationale on the walls of Paris during the anarchic anti-fascist uprisings of 1968, “the less you live.”
    The Futurist writers affirmed nascent industrial capitalism in nearly-industrialized Milan. They loved its violence and hard qualities, not the soft values of consumer capitalism analyzed by Jonathan Raban, among others (and therefore it might be unwise to leap too easily from Cendrars and the Futurists to the modern shopping mall). The Futurist writers of the early twentieth century regarded the process of shopping as a sublime, magical and mysterious homecoming to a rediscovered self. Shopping centers and malls like the grands magasins of Paris (such as Les Halles) and Berlin were referred to memorably by Blaise Cendrars in 1909 as “the last stop of desire” (68). That mystical fascination with power that Marinetti identified in the huge, collage-like catalogue of connections and affinities of the modern city seems to be realized today in the modern shopping mall, with its glass and chrome architecture, waterfalls and neon shop-front displays-the kind of metalized, mechanized commercial art to which Cendrars and Marinetti were looking forward in 1913 and 1909, respectively.
    It is clear from Marinetti’s and Carrà’s Futurist manifestos that the Futurist movement regarded the popular type of artificial, surface-oriented architecture as not only aesthetically beautiful but somehow spiritually transcendent, its dependence on consumption a metaphysical ideal. The Futurists eliminated traditional distinctions between the consumer-based, money making designs of mass consumer culture and the autonomous, non-commercial artifacts of high art. In a piece from 1927, for example, Kasimir Malevich refers to advertising as poetry, as “the flower of contemporary life.” “It represents,” he claims, “the warmest signs of the vigor of today’s men-indeed, one of the seven wonders of the world” (19). To Blaise  Cendrars, the typology of the market place was a sign of life, of warm friendliness and beauty:

    Have you ever thought about the sadness that streets, squares, stations, subways, first-class
    hotels, dance-halls, movies, dining cars, highways, nature would all exhibit without luminous
    signboards, without the false blandishments of loudspeakers, and imagine the sadness and
    monotony of meals and wine without polychrome labels and fancy menus? (103)


    In the earlier writings of Cendrars and Malevich, there are often implications that visions of the shopping center or grand magasin are almost transcendental ones, in which the process of shopping and consumption is an august transaction mystically asserting the presence of the human soul.
    To agree with Cendrars and Malevich in welcoming the activity of shopping-culture is not necessarily to discount the criticism of Susan Willis and other writers of the fantasy utopia this shopping-culture offers people. Of course, the moral and ideological components of shopping pleasures cannot at any point be disentangled from the social and economic determinants of shopping itself, since this is, after all, a pre-eminently economic process. Keeping the criticism of Willis and others in mind, I wish to suggest simply that there are different ways of approaching the text of shopping. To agree with Blaise Cendrars and Kaspar Malevich is to interpret what some believe to be the inescapable alienation of the self in consumer culture as a joyful loss of subjectivity similar to what Barthes describes in The Pleasure of the Text as jouissance. Both lines of argument, moreover, reach the same conclusion-that this lack of subjectivity can never be sustained, and that shopping is, in the end, inherently unsatisfactory.
    In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes describes the plural text as an object or body (“corpus”) whose function is the production of pleasure for the consumer. The text, writes Barthes, should be “an object of pleasure” related to the “pleasures of life.” Indeed, Barthes theorized the jouissance of the consumer as one of the major internal codes and conventions governing the text. He points out in The Pleasure of the Text that the idea of jouissance has seldom been included in studies of literature or cultural studies, and is generally set aside as irrelevant to textual criticism. Barthes’s promotion of hedonism-of looking for enjoyment in the text, of “the pleasure of the text”-is therefore, in his view, a very radical step. The task of analyzing the process of shopping thus partly involves exploring the common sensations, perceptions and emotional states aroused by it, which can often be blissful and delirious, as well as, in the case of Willis and a number of Marxist writers, wary and critical.
    In her essay “Things to do with Shopping Centers,” Meaghan Morris points out that the shopping center form itself (as a building consecrated to the perpetual present of consumption and ‘nowness’) is one of the few new building types of our time. Like department stores before them (and which they now usually contain), shopping centers are often described as palaces of dreams, halls of mirrors, galleries of illusion, and so on. This rhetoric is, of course, related to the vision of the shopping center as Eden or paradise, as a mirror to utopian desire.
    These Edenic allegories of consumption in general, and of shopping centers in particular, can be found in a number of modern reveries on the subject of shopping culture. Meaghan Morris, for example, is interested in what differentiates particular shopping centers from one another, looking at how they produce and maintain what architectural writer Neville Quarry calls “a unique sense of place”-that is, a mythology or an identity. Morris points out that, despite their constant aura of change and ‘nowness,’ shopping centers can produce a sense of place for economic, come-hither reasons, and that this dual quality is very much part of the shopping center’s strategies of appeal, ‘seductiveness,’ and also of its management of change. “The stirring tension between the massive stability of the center and the continually shifting, ceaseless spectacle within and around the ‘center’,” writes Morris, “is one of the things that people who like shopping centers really love about shopping centers” (195).
    Here, again, history becomes pertinent. Unlike Meaghan Morris, today’s ordinary shopper-the inhabitant of a world of metropolitan complexes and heroic suburban hypermarkets-is rather less likely than an early twentieth century European poet to discover allegories of Eden in her weekly trip to the mall. There is also the consideration that the contemporary urban shopper is naturally accustomed to the spectatorship demanded of the consumption process because this kind of spectatorship is almost directly paralleled by cinematic forms, including television and video. Anne Frieberg’s work on cinema and the postmodern prudently analyzes the correlation between cinematic spectatorship and the construction of the consumer gaze.
    The shopping process can be described as a text of jouissance because it can be, for some, a passionate experience, an expressive act. If we choose to buy into the ideology of consumer capitalism often denounced as ‘false consciousness,’ we can begin to understand how an accepted form of social democracy is embedded in the ever-present, neon-lit, time-free shopping mall or the ubiquitous invitations of the busy urban street. If we buy into the ideology of consumer capitalism, we all trade equally in the culture, and success in today’s society is the affirmation of the individual as a maximizer of consumption. What typifies the writing of French theorists like Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard is the antic image of a society in which consumers and commodities seem to circulate freely and endlessly in a fantastic democracy of consumption.
    Of course, there are many different ways of shopping, and different shoppers can attain jouissance from the process of shopping in a variety of different forms. For some, jouissance is attained simply from being present in the shopping mall itself, with its glass and chrome architecture, its colored signs, its spectacular galleries and gigantic luxurious halls. For other shoppers, the moment of jouissance is the actual moment of purchase, when the carefully wrapped item transfers ownership and becomes part of the shopper’s daily life and cultural meanings. And then for shoppers like Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, shopping is a kind of mystical, transcendent rite of passage:

    Nicole bought from a great list that ran to two pages, and bought the things in the shop windows
    besides. …She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and
    ivory. …As the whole system swayed and thundered onward, it lent a feverish bloom … to [her]
    wholesale buying …(123).

    And it is in this particular context--of shopping as a text of jouissance--that I want to read London’s Covent Garden Market, and the many shopping-pleasures it contains.
    Covent Garden is centrally located, with its own subway station, and has developed into one of London’s most popular attractions, not only for tourists, but also for a divergent population of locals and other Londoners. Unlike most U.S. shopping centers, the market is a traditional local landmark with a unique ‘history’ which was constructed into a public shopping area in 1830 by Charles Fowler, and originally designed as a produce market. The area’s name recalls the ancient convent garden tended by the monks of Westminster Abbey. When he abolished the monasteries in 1536, Henry VIII bestowed this land upon John Russell, the first Earl of Bedford. The Earl’s descendents developed it into a fashionable piazza in the seventeenth century, and retain a financial interest in the area until this day. Covent Garden was abandoned as a produce market in 1974, and subsequently restored by London County Council to its 1880 appearance, with the additional creation of two sunken courts, significantly increasing the leasable area available. The historic pattern of structures and streets was left undisturbed, leaving the original urban fabric intact. It is this (artificial) historical ‘authenticity’ that links Covent Garden to traditional shopping loci such as the ‘spectacle of goods’ arcade analyzed by Benjamin.
    These two internal sunken courts now both house Italian restaurants, while the walkways framing the courts are lined with small, upmarket, expensive shops specializing in designer clothes and uniquely English items directed mainly at the wealthier class of tourists-hand carved pipes, leathers, rugs, woollen garments, home décor, and so on. On either side of these walkways, further on, wider stone passageways contain mainly small boutiques, also very expensive, selling mostly women’s clothing and lingerie, with a couple of men’s specialist tailors and outfitters, and one or two Italian terrace restaurants.
    To the right of these passages is the main courtyard, a large, wider, open area, still under cover, surrounded by less exclusive, more reasonably-priced wholefood cafés, fast-food takeout stands and shops selling music, tapes, gifts and clothes similar to those on sale in Carnaby Street and elsewhere. Moving further east toward the subway station, this courtyard gives out on to a large cluster of cheap, crowded, piled-up stalls selling mainly music, posters and postcards, and still further to the east are four rows of open market stalls, again catering mainly to a youthful population of shoppers. These stalls sell mainly shoes, clothes, hats and bags, all very similar to the ones on sale elsewhere in London, in Carnaby Street and Camden Lock. All over this area are other, smaller stalls and sometimes just salesmen, often of dubious legality, selling tourist items, postcards, watches, electronic goods, and so on. It is this area of the market that is perhaps the most ‘authentic,’ since Charles Fowler’s 1880 produce market would have been a similar cluster of haphazard, transient one-man stalls and booths, rather than the smoothly designed shop-fronts and stone walkways of the reconstructed indoor market areas.
    Inside the indoor market itself, the walkways and staircases are all stone, framed by iron railings, balconies, black gaslights, authentic-looking signs detailing the names of streets and so forth, and plants in large wooden urns and wheelbarrows. The main courtyard is surrounded by wide cloister-like stone archways--broken up by seats, plants, wheelbarrows, signs, and the seats and tables of open-air eating areas--and a high, raftered, pigeon-filled roof covers the whole structure. The open market outside is also cobbled, but contains no wheelbarrows, walkways or plant pots.
    Covent Garden has a relaxed, informal and interesting setting. The large public space in the main courtyard is regularly populated, especially on Saturdays, by entertainers, music, magic acts, mime, theater, circus acts, performing animals, and so on. The activity of shopping in this area is thereby transformed into a form of entertainment where the shopper population is relaxed and therefore, at least according to the theories of Covent Garden’s designers, in the mood for spending money-an example of a supposedly ‘natural,’ irrational urge in consumers which is in fact the result of a rigorously rational entrepreneurial scheme.
    This relaxed, holiday atmosphere is greatly enhanced by the numerous enjoyable, non-shopping activities ‘surrounding’ the shopping area which characterize the uniqueness of the environment. A number of stage-design shops, moss-covered ‘artisan’s studios’ and lively pubs skirt the shopping environment ‘proper,’ including the notorious Lamb and Flag-the pub where poet John Dryden was attacked and nearly murdered by an angry mob opposed to his writings. Other diversions in the area include the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in the Punch and Judy pub, the Bow Street Magistrates Court, and the site of the booksellers’ home where Boswell first met Dr. Johnson in 1763.
The only part of the original piazza to survive is architect Inigo Jones’s St. Paul’s Church, known as the ‘actors’ church,’ because a number of famous actors and artists are entombed within its interior. Flanking the reconstructed square itself-perhaps best known for its appearance in the movie set of My Fair Lady-are the Theatre Royal and the Royal Opera House, both of which date from the nineteenth century. The former, embellished with an impressive portico and a long, blue colonnade, has been the site of three attempted regicides. The latter, one of the world’s few great opera houses, is also the home of the Royal Ballet.
These fascinating and illustrious places are not associated with the shopping activities within the market directly, but play particular roles in determining the consumer behaviors encountered in Covent Garden. For example, much like the lively space of the main courtyard which serves to entertain shoppers with its travelling mime and magic acts, St. Paul’s Church and the Theater Royal provide additional diversionary activities for shoppers. The presence of these diversions may help to explain the consumer behavior of the non-shoppers or onlookers who decide to visit the shopping areas after visiting the Mechanical Theatre or the Royal Opera House, with no particular purchases in mind. The reconstructed market’s pivotal location in the center of many exciting non-shopping activities is another studied meditation on the part of its crafty designers.
Covent Garden is also a place for urban socialization, and certain areas have been specifically designed for shoppers to stroll, meet, sit down, relax and chat-promenades, balconies, terraces, indoor gardens, plazas and so on. The areas around the open market and the edge of the main courtyard are populated especially by young people, both shopping and ‘hanging out,’-listening to music, trying on clothes, leafing through racks of posters, skateboarding, smoking, sitting around, watching each other, enjoying themselves without necessarily spending any money. There is also a variety of eating opportunities available to satisfy the divergent shopper population at different times of the day or night. The shopper can choose among terrace restaurants, indoor cafes, stand-up counters, fast-food takeout stands, the food hall in the main courtyard (an international array of takeaway food stalls surrounding a large communal area of tables and chairs), or, in the open market outside, hot-dog and hamburger vans.
The interior and exterior spaces of Covent Garden are related, and the public pedestrian areas of the market are integrated with existing street and pavement systems outside through the use of multiple large entrances. These exterior spaces, such as the cloister-like structures surrounding the main court, flow freely into buildings and are joined with interior pedestrian areas. The indoor market has a number of plaza-level connections and subtle level changes whose connections to the main cobbled courtyard are enhanced by the visual transparency of the stone archways-it is possible to see in and out of all of the buildings all of the time, creating a sense of spaciousness, air, light and freedom. This continuity of pedestrian spaces, moreover, means that the shopper circulation is smooth, varied and effortless, and the fact that there are so many different routes to choose from means that every shopper’s visit is, each time, somewhat unique. This is partly what Jonathan Raban is referring to when he describes the city as “soft, amenable to the dazzling and libidinous variety of dreams, interpretations” (15), a place where individuals can ‘be themselves’ while performing a multiplicity of roles.
In a way, the shops lining the internal walls of Covent Garden represent an example of what Guy Debord referred to forcefully in the 1960s as le spectacle de la marchandise. The items displayed in these shop windows are in no sense basic items bought for definite needs, but are there mainly to be looked at, for visual fascination and for the remarkable sight of things not to be found at home. A couple of these shops present extremely visual window displays of paintings and holograms, as though the display itself existed simply to provide the shopper with entertainment, with no obligation to buy, or even, for that matter to enter the store. Moreover, the contemplation (rather than the purchase) of such luxuries is no longer-as in the early days of the market-a prerogative of the aristocracy, since they are there to be seen by everybody.
For those critical of this notion of democratized consumption, Covent Garden is somewhat unique since it also offers an alternate perspective. In contrast to the costly and exclusive items displayed in the chic and beguiling indoor shops, the open market outside contains ranks of simple, small, individual stalls, manned personally by the stallholders and their families, with no advertising, window displays or publicity except for the occasional shouted encouragement of the stallholders. Here, the shopper can browse through racks of used clothing, exchange books and music, stop and chat or haggle over the price of goods for sale. Obviously, this is quite a different form of shopping from that which takes place within the internal quarters of the market, and the juxtaposition of the two Covent Garden ‘markets’ in this fashion-surely anticipated by the market’s designers-creates an authentic feeling of democratized consumption. Thus, the shopper without much money to spend, or with no specific purchase in mind, can browse and window-shop in the internal structures of the market, before spending money in the open market outside-a kind of shopping that almost everybody can afford.
It should be pointed out, however, that this fusion of shopping-cultures is fairly rare, and in fact unseen in suburban chain-store malls in Europe and the U.S., with rare exceptions, such as Les Halles in Paris. And while the feeling of democratized consumption may be an authentic and liberating one, and while many people certainly visit both areas of the market, the same consumers do not tend to move from one market to the other. The goods outside are not lower-priced substitutes for the goods inside, so those shoppers who consume at the outdoor market are most likely obliged to do so out of economic necessity, not because of a better deal outside, nor because of personal choice. Quite clearly, window shopping in the interior mall engenders a kind of desire that cannot be fulfilled by the act of shopping in the outdoor market, and so the sense of democratized consumption evoked by the market’s relaxed mix of activity is clearly an illusion.
    And this is only one of the many different ways in which the internal ‘reconstructed’ Covent Garden market is essentially not real. It is a theatrical representation of a nostalgic image of a kind of street life that no longer exists, in most of the U.K., at least. When Covent Garden was re-opened in June 1980, extensive press coverage described it as “London’s first permanent late-night shopping centre,” an “upmarket shopping leisure development,” “London’s new historic shopping experience,” and so on. And although the 1980 reconstruction was ostensibly built to the market’s original design with great concern for authenticity-the wheelbarrows are the original flowersellers’ carts, for example-all the ‘gaslights’ are actually electric and ‘glazed’ in plastic, the modern sprinkler system for extinguishing fires is fairly naked, and the cash-registers in the upmarket, air-conditioned stores are all of the newest kind, meaning that several are linked by telephone to credit-card company hotlines. Critic Peter York feels that there is something about it that reminds him of Disneyland in Florida. “Covent Garden is a good example of the commercially successful consolidation of enthusiasms,” writes York, “--the enthusiasms of the aesthetics of design types who create, endorse and consume today’s …art-directed worlds where everything is designed” (10).
    To those who regard the shopping spree as an example of bewitchment by the false consciousness of consumerism, there is a clear connection between this fake theatrical representation of a nostalgic urban street life, and the emphasis in the shopping mall (and in other aspects of popular culture) on the process of surface and packaging. This emphasis also seems to be related in some way to the concept of newness. In her book Consuming Passions, Judith Williamson suggests that the power of the purchase-taking home a new thing, the anticipation of unwrapping-seems to drink up the desire for something new (13). Susan Willis points out that commodities in the shopping mall are always introduced as ‘new,’ and forever afterwards must repeat this moment of ‘newness,’ even if it is the same old laundry detergent, packaged in a new box and endowed with a new ‘fresh scent.’ “Newness ensures that consumption will be a unique experience, will in fact have the power to compensate loss” (47), writes Willis. Jean Baudrillard agrees. “Everyone has to be up-to-date and recycle himself annually, monthly, seasonally, in his clothes, his things, his car,” writes Baudrillard in Idées. “If he doesn’t, he’s not a true citizen of consumer society” (46).
    Possibly, part of the success of the refurbished Covent Garden is due to this constant illusion of ‘newness,’ even, ironically, in the ‘new’ repackaging of history, and the market’s unique blend of historical ‘authenticity’ with an ‘upmarket shopping leisure experience.’ I would add, however, that in the case of Covent Garden, it is not necessary for the shopper to be ‘bewitched’ by this theatrical representation of urban street life and the false consciousness it is supposed to produce. It would easily be possible to spend a pleasant day in Covent Garden spending no money whatsoever-clearly, large numbers of people often do. Even for the visitor who does spend money, however, it is possible to consciously join in this celebration of artifice, packaging and plastic, of image rather than reality, of shopping, rather than what is bought.
    Indeed, rather than being alienated by it, most of the shoppers and young visitors to Covent Garden seem happy to participate in their own ways in the pseudo-authentic ‘shopping event’ that is being offered, where, instead of just consumer good, stores ostensibly retail festivity, relaxation, and magical shopping ‘adventures.’ Many of the young shoppers and visitors use the spaces available in the outside market and the main courtyard in their own ways, to use its spaces for their own form of revelry and pleasure-for meeting, chatting, listening to music, and so on. Other visitors use the spaces Covent Garden offers in order to make their living, either by putting on a circus act, dance or magic show, or else setting up their own (illegal) stalls, making use of the vast and diverse shopper population as both audience and customers.
    Covent Garden’s emphasis on appearance, on seeming rather than being, on gesture rather than substance, gives pleasure to any shopper or visitor able to participate in this game, or to reinterpret it in their own way, without necessarily falling victim to a capitalist charade. Sometimes the most recognizable commodity-that is, what is seen as wholly ‘artificial’-is somehow freer of past associations, and therefore more capable of giving access to alternative meanings.
    For those shoppers and visitors to Covent Garden interested in re-interpreting its spaces for their own uses and their own meanings, for those who are interested in ‘hanging out’ in shopping malls, viewing the different range of goods on offer, playing games with their own self-image and so on, then the pleasure to be obtained from shopping and its related activities is hedonistic, and similar to that of jouissance, something Barthes advocates, and believes to be inherently propitious. For most other shoppers, however, the psychological double-bind enforced by the encratic language of consumption can be avoided neither by recourse to legitimate (consumer) objects of desire, nor by the pleasures of packaging and ‘newness.’ For these shoppers, jouissance is achieved only fleetingly, in the moment of purchase, as the shopper discovers an anodynic joy in abandonment to the imperative to consume.