The Shoppers as Flaneur?-Dialectics between Flaneur, … Su.pdf · space, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, ... that by using “spectator” instead of “reader,”

Asia Culture Forum 2006 /

Asian Youth Culture Camp "Doing Cultural Spaces in Asia"

Session 10 “The Location of the Body and Bodily Movement in the Age of Simulation”

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The Shoppers as Flaneur?-Dialectics between Flaneur, Gaze, and Space in the Shopping Mall of Metropolitan Cities: Using Global Mall in Taipei as an Example

Jing-fen Su / National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Abstract

With the impact of globalization and internationalization, spacious shopping malls have brought

significant changes in the urban lifestyle and spatial practices of people in Taiwan. By offering

customers diverse products from all over the globe and combining shopping with entertainment, these

westernized shopping malls aim at drastically transforming consumers’ shopping habits and leisure

activities, which ambition, however, may not always be accomplished with success. For example, the

recently opened Global Mall, the biggest shopping mall in suburban Taipei and the only Japanese-style

one in Taiwan, proclaims to “bring new life” to local residents. Despite the fact that the space of Global

Mall is spacious and comfortable, shopping inside the mall is nevertheless boring rather than exciting,

without much pleasure as expected in shopping on the street or in other “authentic” American-style

shopping malls.

Motivated by the attempt to account for the problematics of shopping in Global Mall, I will adopt

theories such as Michel de Certeau’s “walking rhetorics,” Walter Benjamin’s flâneur and Arcades

Project (referring back to Poe and Baudelaire), Henri Lefebvre’s production of space, and Michel

Foucault’s heterotopia and panoptica to explore the possible connections between shopping and flânerie,

between walking in the city/mall and artistic creation, between body and space, and between the seeing

subject and the object seen. With this paper, I hope to present the intriguing dialectics of the body, gaze,

and space in the shopping mall in such metropoles as Taipei, and demonstrate how the mall’s

proclaimed goal of globalization may conflict with the needs and shopping habits of local inhabitants,

who display their subversive power within the fixed, constructed organization of urban spaces by

resorting to various strategies of appropriation of the public space for their own private use.

Keywords: shopping mall, flâneur, walking rhetorics, gaze, body, heterotopia, panoptica, contradictory

space, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allen Poe,

Henri Lefebvre.

Introduction

Under the influence of globalization and internationalization, spacious shopping malls or

centers have brought some changes in the urban lifestyle and shopping behavior in Taiwan.

Within Taipei City we find such a shopping mall as Living Mall, in the suburban areas, Taimall

and MetroWalk Shopping Center are typical examples. Mostly modeled on American-style

shopping malls, these shopping malls introduce alternative shopping experiences and spatial




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practices quite distinct from traditional department stores. The newly opened shopping mall,

Global Mall, which is situated in the intersection of Pan-Chiao and Chung-He, Taipei County,

claims to be the biggest shopping mall in suburban Taipei and the only one Japanese-style

shopping mall in Taiwan. As its name suggests, this shopping mall aims at offering customers

diverse products from around the world with the ambition to transform the shopping behavior

and leisure activities of people living in the suburban areas in Taipei County.

Global Mall is about two times as big as MetroWalk, the same size as Taimall, and about one-

fourth as big as Living Mall. Similar to the shopping centers in western markets, the shopping

space inside Global Mall is quite vast and comfortable, allowing more than “elbow-room”

distance among shoppers. However, from the reactions posted by various customers in online

personal blogs or discussion forums as well as from my own experience, the mall is big but

boring, spacious but dull: in an one-hour tour you can already finish strolling all the shopping

areas, including the supermarket in the basement; there is not much pleasure, much less

excitement as should be obtained in ordinary shopping along the street, in the supermarket, or in

other “authentic” American-style shopping malls. How could we account for such

disappointment felt by the customers contrary to the investor and designer’s ambition and

expectation? What are the possible factors contributing to the failure of Global Mall in meeting

the shopping needs and desire of local residents as its claimed potential customers?

To address the issue, I focus on the problems of Global Mall in its interior design, spatial

arrangement of stores and restaurants, designs of shopping route, and customer’s behavior and

sensual perception. The attention is paid especially to the relationship between shopping

subjects and shopping space, between gazing others and being gazed at, and between the body

and the space it exists and exploits. I will start with Michel de Certeau’s theory of “walking

rhetorics,” and adopt Henri Lefebvre’s abstract space and contradictory space, Walter

Benjamin’s flâneur and “Arcades Project,” as well as Michel Foucault’s idea of panopticon.

With this study, I hope to present the interesting dialectical relationship between the body, gaze,

and space, demonstrating how such dialectics are carried out in the shopping mall in Taiwan and

how the mall’s proclaimed goal of globalization conflicts with the shopping habits of local

Taiwanese residents.

For convenience of discussion, I will divide the paper into two main parts, the first one devoted

to review of relevant theories, including Michel de Certeau’s “walking rhetorics” and the

discourse on flâneur brought forth by Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter

Benjamin. The second part will address the specific issues of Global Mall, its basic facts,

ambition and proclaimed goals; actual shopping experience in the mall, and the proposed

explanations for the problematics in shopping in Global Mall.

Part I. Review of Theories: de Certeau’s “Walking Rhetorics” and Discourse on Flâneur

by Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin

Michel de Certeau’s “Walking Rhetorics”

Although Michel de Certeau does not offer a theory of the flâneur as Benjamin attempts to do,

his discourse on “walking rhetorics” in the essay “Walking in the City” (1984) is quite relevant

and can serve as the starting point for my discussion of the shopper as flâneur who walks the

space of modern cities. The setting of Michel de Certeau’s essay is set in twentieth-century New

York City, a busy, bustling metropolis. In contrast to the looking down from “the summit of the

World Trade Center” at the beginning of his essay, which produces a bird’s eye view of the




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panorama of Manhattan, de Certeau announces that the “ordinary practitioners of the city” are

walkers (“Wandersmänner”), because walking is “an elementary form of this experience of the

city” (93). The city walkers are writing a text of the city; that is, the urban spaces serve as a

blank text on which the city practitioners can compose “a manifold story” by the networks of

their “moving, intersecting writing” and thus organize the “bustling city” (93). However, these

walkers in the city are all like “blind men” (93). Their bodies “follow the thicks and thins of an

urban ‘text,’” which they produce but yet are unable to read, because these spaces they make

use of “cannot be seen” (93).

It is insightful and also problematic that de Certeau claims the text/story composed by city

walkers with their bodies “has neither author nor spectator” (93). This statement is insightful in

that by using “spectator” instead of “reader,” de Certeau puts more emphasis on the viewing of a

“spectacle” of the city, composed of moving things, people, or events that are taking place

before one’s eyes and stimulating one’s five senses with sounds, noises, colors, odors,

movements, etc., than on the plain reading of a static, silent text written with linguistic signs

that just requires one’s vision and the function of mind. On the other hand, this phrase is

problematic in that de Certeau denies walkers of the city the position of “authors.” Rather, he

describes these practitioners of the city as “blind men” since they cannot read the text they are

writing, nor can this text be read by others. De Certeau even negatively characterizes their

blindness in their knowledge of urban spaces as “that of lovers in each other’s arms” (93). Are

these city walkers just blind, automatic robots unconsciously performing their duty of walking

without knowing what they are doing?

Just as Descartes uses a blind man as an example of tactile knowledge replacing the optical one

to defy the predominance of the eye and vision, de Certeau is also trying to substitute the

“imaginary totalizations” of the eye with walking, an activity of the body moving through the

urban spaces. De Certeau differentiates between two forms of power combating each other in

the city: “collective mode of administration” and “individual mode of reappropriation” (96).

The former type of power, “programmed and regulated operations” and performed by urbanistic

administrative system, aims at a rational organization and regulation of the surface of the city,

whereas the latter type of power, the “unreadable but stable tactics” adopted by individual users

of urban spaces, resist being suppressed or eliminated by the disciplinary power and produce

“surreptitious creativities” instead (95-96). For de Certeau, these spatial practices appropriated

by individual users of urban spacer play an important role in determining the conditions of

social life.

Furthermore, de Certeau cleverly points out the connections between walking and language. To

begin with, just as linguistic signifiers refer to and replace the absent signifieds, in walking the

paths, trajectories and the trace left behind indicate the lost space that has been passed by. As de

Certeau puts it, “[t]o walk is to lack a place” (103). The activities of urban pedestrians—“the

operations of walking,” such as strolling, wandering or window shopping—are transformed into

“reversible lines” drawn on the city map. In this way, as de Certeau shows, there is a second

property demonstrating the connection between geographical and linguistic systems: the

geographical system can “transform action into legibility” in linguistic system, since the visible

trace of walking renders invisible the kinesthetic, spatial practice of walking (97). In brief, the

operations of walking can be transcribed into trace or relic left behind on city maps, though only

to be forgotten.

The most pronounced connection between language and walking advocated by de Certeau is

evidenced in his use of the term “pedestrian speech acts” (97). Citing Roland Barthes’s remarks




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that “We speak our city…merely by inhabiting it, walking through it, looking at it”

(Architecture d’aujourd’hui 153 [1970-71]: 11-13; qtd. in de Certeau 219n12), de Certeau

declares that the “act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to

the statements uttered” (97). Walking can thus be defined as “a space of enunciation,”

possessing, like speech act in language, a triple enunciative functions: the pedestrian’s

“appropriation of topographical system” (just as a speaker appropriates the language), offering a

“spatial acting-out of the place” (just as a speech act can be viewed as an “acoustic acting-out of

language”), and implying relations among “contracts” in movements (just as a verbal allocution

can put the contracts between different interlocutors into action) (de Certeau 97-98).

The notion of “pedestrian speech act” provides an alternative way of understanding how city

walkers make use of or appropriate urban spaces. De Certeau stresses that the walker can

actualize the possibilities embedded in a constructed spatial order by moving around,

privileging, transforming, inventing, or abandoning a few spatial signifiers with his or her

“crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking” (98). The walker may actualize only

some of the possibilities established by the constructed spatial order, but he or she may further

expand the possibilities (by means of shortcuts or detours) or prohibitions (by deliberately

refusing to take the ordinary or even obligatory paths). “The user of a city,” as Roland Barthes

puts it, “picks out certain fragments of the statement in order to actualize them in secret” (qtd. in

de Certeau 219n10). Just as the writer selects from the linguistic elements or rhetoric strategies

available in language, the walker also make choices from the spatial “turns of phrase” or

“stylistic figures”; all of these spatial signifiers constitutes “a rhetoric of walking” (99-100). For

example, the walker may “condemn” some places to “inertia or disappearance” while

“composing” with other spatial elements that are “rare, accidental or illegitimate” (99). Like

speech, walking “affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses,” or “respects” the trajectories it

“speaks”; all these “modalities” change “from step to step,” vary with an infinite diversity

according to the time, path, and the walker (99).

The operations of walking also constitute space by first forming points, then lines, and finally

the whole surface of space. For this de Certeau draws analogy between walking and weaving

with an allusion to the goddess’s footsteps in Virgil’s Aeneid. Giving a central role to the

footsteps, de Certeau interprets the story as starting with footsteps, the number of which cannot

be calculated because each unit possesses its own unique quality with “a style of tactile

apprehension and kinesthetic singularities” (97). The paths intertwined by footsteps “weave” the

spaces together. In a similar way, as de Certeau explains, pedestrian movements give shape to

the urban space in a city.

De Certeau’s theory of “pedestrian speech act” or “walking rhetorics” are quite revealing in that

it offers us a new way to read the resisting or subversive power of city walkers within the

seemingly constraining, immobile order of already established urban spaces. It is also helpful in

reading the activities of shoppers/flâneurs walking in urban spaces such as on the streets, in the

arcades, or in the shopping mall. However, de Certeau’s theory of walking has been criticized

for not taking the concept of body into consideration in theorizing spatial practices. Since body

is the corporal existence of a being within spaces, such negligence is significant. To compensate

for this in the following discussion I will bring in the figure of flâneur put forward by Poe,

Baudelaire, and Benjamin.

The Figure of Flâneur in Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin




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As my argument goes, the shopper walking in the shopping mall in some way resembles the

flâneur strolling on the streets or in the arcades of modern cities. The notion of flâneur

originates in the French poet Charles Baudelaire’s essay “The Painter of Modern Life”

(translated in 1972), and later on popularized by Walter Benjamin’s classic analysis of

Baudelaire—Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1973). Both

Baudelaire and Benjamin allude to Edgar Allen Poe’s anti-detective short story “The Man of the

Crowd” (Poe 1958). To grasp the meanings of the mysterious, ambiguous figure of the flâneur, I

will investigate how Poe, Baudelaire, and Benjamin portray this figure and how each writer

responds to the texts of his predecessor(s) on the same subject. I will subdivide the discussions

of flâneur into the following sections: (1) the time and space for flânerie; (2) the flâneur’s

identity in socio-economic dimension (including gender, class, and age); and (3) the flâneur’s

intention and activities within urban spaces.

1. The Time and Space for Flânerie

The first question to be raised about flâneur is where, i.e. in what kinds of space, and when, i.e.

in which historical period and at which hours of the day, this figure appears and moves about. In

Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd,” there are two candidates suitable to be described as

flâneur: the narrator who newly recovers from his illness and the old man who is pursued by the

narrator. In the beginning of the story before the old man appears, the narrator sits inside a café,

“D— Coffee-House in London” (308), observing leisurely the pedestrians passing by, taking

interest in the “innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of

countenance” of these walkers (309). As the night deepens, an idiosyncratic old man in the

crowd catches the narrator’s attention; out of curiosity, the narrator resolves to come out of the

café to follow the old man “whithersoever he should go” (312). Where does the old man wander,

pursued closely by the narrator? Generally both of them stroll throughout the city of London,

from the heart of the city to the verge, and back to the heart again: first along “the great

thoroughfare,” then “crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly,” turning to a square, making a

circuit there, rushing along a deserted by-street to “a large and busy bazaar,” hurrying “through

many crooked and peopleless lanes” to a theatre, then to the “verge of the city,” “the most

noisome quarter of London,” entering a bar, and finally back to the “heart of the mighty

London” (312-14). Except for the shops in the bazaar and the bar, the old man and the narrator

in pursuit stroll outdoors on the streets, lanes, or square of London.

As for the time, Poe’s narrator stayed in the café from the early afternoon to “about the closing

of an evening in autumn” (308) before he catches a glimpse of the old man. Then as the night

deepens, the old man appearing in the crowd draws the narrator’s attention and lures him

outside to plunge into a mad pursuit of the old man. The two characters, one leading and the

other following closely behind, spend a whole night rambling about the nineteenth-century

London till the evening of the second day.

In his article “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire alludes to Poe’s short story “The Man of

the Crowd,” but deliberately changes Poe’s term “the man of the crowd” into “man of the world,

man of crowds,” as the title of section III in his essay indicates. In section III Baudelaire brings

out the painter Constantin Guys, who serves as the model of Baudelaire’s flâneur. Baudelaire

explains that by “man of the world” he means “a man of the whole world, a man who

understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs” (397).

Guys’s knowledge of the customs around the world is probably obtained through extensive

traveling; Baudelaire has earlier described Guys as “by nature a great traveler and very




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cosmopolitan” and depicted how Guys has printed his “travel sketches” of Spain, Turkey, the

Crimes on an English paper (396). Baudelaire connects Constantin Guys with the narrator in

Poe’s story by emphasizing that both the artist and the narrator are “convalescents,” who,

having been “on the point of forgetting every thing,” “passionately want to remember

everything” and are driven by curiosity intensified by the freshness of newly recovering from

illness (397). “The convalescent, like the child,” Baudelaire relates, “enjoys to the highest

degree the faculty of taking a lively interest in things, even the most trivial in appearance” (397-

98). While Poe’s narrator is a true convalescent, who takes interest in an unknown old man and

rushes into the crowd, Guys the artist is “perpetually in the spiritual condition of the

convalescent” (397), a “man-child,” a man with “the genius of childhood,” for whom “no edge

of life is blunted” (399). With this comparison, it can be deduced if for Baudelaire the artist

Guys can be regarded as a flâneur, it is Poe’s narrator rather than the old man that can be called

the flâneur in Baudelaire’s view.

Where and when does Baudelaire’s flâneur, the artist Constantin Guys, move about? Keith

Tester points out in her “Introduction” to The Flâneur (1994) specifies the time and place for

Baudelaire’s flâneur—the public spaces of Paris in mid-nineteenth century (1). In this capital

city, Guys mainly goes out into the streets to observe people and things in search of themes for

his works. As Baudelaire describes:

The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and

his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it

becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and

flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. (399)

Guys enjoys staying in the crowd. He gazes at the landscape of the great city,” and enjoys

watching “handsome equipages,” “proud horses,” “smooth rhythmical gait of the women,” the

“beauty of the children, and even the marching regiment (Baudelaire 401). Getting up early

without wanting to waste any more time sleeping in bed, Guys goes off to watch “the flow of

life move by, majestic and dazzling,” admiring the beauty and harmony of human life presented

in the capital cities (400). As evening comes at “the witching hour, the uncertain light,” with the

gaslight brightening up the street, Constantin Guys will be “the last to leave any place where the

departing glories of daylight linger, where poetry echoes, life pulsates, music sounds” (104).

Finally, we come to the flâneur in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire (1973). As Janet Wolff

succinctly points out, “[t]he streets and arcades of the city are the home of the flâneur” (146).

For Benjamin, Wolff states, the city of the flâneur should be Paris rather than London or Berlin,

since only the former city offers the conditions for flâneurs to flourish. Because the flâneur

mainly “goes botanizing on the asphalt,” Benjamin maintains that “[s]trolling could hardly have

assumed the importance it did without the arcades,” the “glass-covered, marble-paneled

passageways through entire complexes of houses” (36). Lighted from above and “lined with the

most elegant shops,” the arcade is “a city, even a world, in miniature,” which offers the flâneur

“the unfailing remedy for…boredom” (Benjamin 37). The arcade, according to Benjamin, turns

“a boulevard into an intérieur” so that the street becomes a home for the flâneur as much as he

stays “in his four walls” (37).

Later on, Benjamin brings forth the issue of Poe’s use of “gaslight” in the short story “The Man

of the Crowd,” emphasizing “[i]n the course of his story, Poe lets it grow dark. He lingers over

the city by gaslight” (Benjamin 50). Benjamin goes on to describe how “the appearance of the

street as an intérieur on which the phantasmagoria of the flâneur is concentrated is hard to

separate from the gaslight,” and then Benjamin leaps to the next sentence claiming “The first




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gas-lamps burned in the arcades” (50). As our previous discussions of where Poe’s flâneur

hangs around (if we temporarily set aside the problem of who the flâneur is in Poe’s story), it is

clear that Poe does not mention anything like Benjamin’s “arcades” in the story; the gas-lamps,

whose light allows the narrator to examine the pedestrians’ individual faces and to read “the

history of long years,” probably just stand on the streets instead of in the arcades (Poe 311). As

John Rignall indicates, the figure of flâneur plays a central part in Benjamin’s 1935 sketch for

the Arcades Project “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (112). It is thus very likely

that Benjamin deliberately directs his discussions of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s writings on flâneur

in such a way as to include the public spaces of arcades, where Benjamin’s own flâneurs move

about so that he may pave the way for another of his work in process, the Arcades Project.

2. The Flâneur’s Identity: Socio-Economic Dimension

In this section I will briefly discuss the socio-economic identity of the flâneur in Poe,

Baudelaire, and Benjamin, respectively. First, in Poe’s story, the potential candidates who may

deserve the title of flâneur are the narrator and the idiosyncratic old man. No doubt both the

narrator and the old man are male in gender. Concerning class distinction, the narrator is

evidently a well-educated middle class gentleman since he knows Greek and quotes German

and French sayings, has the leisure to sit at a café “[w]ith a cigar in [his] mouth and a newspaper

in [his] lap” (308), casually observing people passing by the whole afternoon. When his

curiosity is aroused by the unknown old man, “putting on an overcoat, and seizing [his] hat and

cane” (311), he walks outside to follow closely behind the old man throughout London from late

night till morning, seemingly without any responsibility to assume. As for the old man,

according to the depiction by the narrator, he is “a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy

years of age” (311), “short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble,” wearing clothes

that are generally “filthy and ragged” and a linen dirty but “of beautiful texture” (312). These

descriptions conceal rather than reveal the identity of the old man in socio-economic dimension,

and such effect may be purposefully intended by the author Poe to suit the formula of (anti-

)detective stories.

In the essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire presupposes a male narrator or observer

(Tester 1). Since the model of Baudelaire’s flâneur is the painter Constantin Guys, this flâneur is

undoubtedly of the masculine gender. The age of Constantin Guys is not specified in the essay,

but from his vitality and daily routines we may speculate him to be a man in the 30s or 40s of

age. As for the socio-economic identity, Guys as a hardworking artist with “striking originality,”

should fit more properly into the middle class.

Benjamin’s flâneur, as he reads Poe’s or Baudelaire’s work, is also presumably of the male

gender, as evidenced in the overwhelming use of masculine pronoun “he” or “his” in referring

to the flâneur. Critics often identify Benjamin’s figure f the flâneur as “the male stroller in the

arcades of nineteenth-century Paris” (Nixon 154). As for socio-economic identity, Benjamin

interprets the flâneurs in either Poe or Baudelaire as the reified, commodified human beings in

the capitalistic society of modern time. The flâneur may be a “man of letters,” that is, a writer or

a poet, who “goes to the marketplace” in search for a buyer; he may be a “customer” lures by

the commodities displayed in the “elegant shops” in the arcades; or he may be one member of

the leisure class turned into “an unwilling detective” as a tactic to justify his own “idleness,” or

unproductivity, an unbearable sin according to bourgeois mores in capitalist society (Benjamin

34, 37, 40-41).




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3. The Flâneur’s Intention and Activities within Urban Spaces

Before heading into the exploration of the flâneur’s intention or activities in Poe’s short story,

we should first address the problem of who the flâneur is. Throughout the short story Poe does

not use the word flâneur; it is not even explicitly specified in Baudelaire’s discussion of Poe.

Only in Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire do we find extensive discussions about the problematic

identity of the flâneur in Poe. Since Poe himself does not offer any clear definition of the flâneur,

not even mentioning the word “flâneur,” we can never know what a flâneur should be like in

Poe’s mind; accordingly, it can scarcely possible to determined whether it is the narrator or the

old man that should be designated as Poe’s flâneur. Instead, the only probable criteria for us to

make the judgment is to adopt either Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s definitions of the flâneur, or to

examine how Baudelaire or Benjamin interprets Poe’s story.

For Baudelaire, as I have mentioned in earlier discussions, the narrator is more legitimate than

the old man to be called the flâneur in Poe’s story. Baudelaire draws a comparison between

Poe’s narrator as a convalescent newly discovering from an illness and the artist Constantin

Guys who similarly possesses the child-like condition of the convalescent, who “enjoys to the

highest degree the faculty of taking a lively interest in things, even the most trivial in

appearance” (398). Baudelaire has explicitly names his artist Guys “the perfect flâneur,” “the

passionate spectator” (399); therefore, in identifying Guys with Poe’s narrator, the narrator is the

flâneur in Baudelaire’s interpretation of Poe’s story.

If Poe’s narrator is the flâneur as Baudelaire reads it, then we should ask what purpose or

intention this flâneur has and what kinds of activities he does within the urban space of London.

The aim of the narrator at the beginning of the story is more casual, verging on “aimlessness,”

for he just sits at a café amusing himself by occasionally “poring over advertisements,”

“observing the promiscuous company in the room,” or “peering through the smoky panes into

the street” to fight against his “ennui” (Poe 308). In later parts of the story, however, because his

intense curiosity is greatly aroused by the unknown old man appearing in the crowd, the

narrator takes on a serious task of pursuing the old man and inspecting what he does and where

he visits. At the end of the second day the narrator finally abandons his quest on account of

physical weariness on one hand and mental frustration on the other, coming to the conclusion

that the old man is the “type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man

of the crowd….It will be in vain to follow; for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds”

(Poe 314). In brief, Poe’s narrator begins with “aimless” observation of the world around him,

then assumes the job of a detective in pursuit of a suspect, and finally renounces his quest that

has proved nothing.

Baudelaire’s own version of flâneur, the “man-child” artist Constantin Guys, craves for mixing

with the crowd, observing every details of the people, things, or events taking place in urban

spaces. Guys once says, recorded by Baudelaire: “any man who is not weighed down with a

sorrow so searching as to touch all his faculties, and who is bored in the midst of the crowd, is a

fool! A fool! and I despise him!” (Baudelaire 400; emphasis added). Moreover, when watching

the body of troops marching along the boulevard, the artist shows empathy into the things he

observes: “his soul will vibrate with the soul of the regiment, marching as though it were one

living creature, proud image of joy and discipline!” (401). Any shift in fashion such as the style

of dress, decorations of ribbons, height of waist-lines on skirts, etc., would have been detected

by the artist’s sharp “eagle’s eye” (Baudelaire 401). He can “be away from home and yet to feel

at home anywhere,” desiring “to see the world, to be at the very centre of the world, and yet to

be unseen of the world” (399-400). In other words, he prefers to be an active observer seeing




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rather than a passive object being seen; that is why Baudelaire calls him “a prince enjoying his

incognito wherever he goes” (400). Disguising himself in incognito allows Guys more freedom

to gaze at people without being recognized.

Baudelaire’s poet-artist is not without aim in his flânerie. Instead, “this solitary mortal” is

endowed with “an active imagination.” While roaming the spaces of cities, he “has a nobler aim

than that of the pure idler, a more general aim, other than the fleeting pleasure of circumstance.

He is looking for that indefinable something we may be allowed to call ‘modernity’”

(Baudelaire 402). In addition, Baudelaire’s flâneur is not only an observer in search for

modernity but also a creative artist, a (re-)producer of the images he has seen. After Constantin

Guys sees, inspects and analyzes the equipments of the troops marching by the boulevard, “all

these details flood chaotically into him; and within a few minutes the poem that comes with it

all is virtually composed” (401). Baudelaire declares: “few men have the gift of seeing; fewer

still have the power to express themselves” (402). It is clear that Baudelaire eulogizes modernity

over antiquity; for him the greatest works of art should be produced not with tedious study of

expressions or gestures of former ages displayed in museums, but by going out into the real

world to observe the real life. Therefore, if a painter gets his inspiration from a courtesan

painted by Titian or Raphael when commissioned to paint a contemporary courtesan, the

resulting work would be “fraudulent, ambiguous, and difficult to understand” (405) in

Baudelaire’s evaluation.

In contrast, as praised by Baudelaire, Constantin Guys is “guided by nature, tyrannized over by

circumstance” to take a different path; he begins by “looking at life, and only later did he

contrive to learn how to express life” (406). Guys’s painting displays a “striking originality,”

with “an additional proof of obedience to the impression, of a flattery of truth” (406). After

conducting his observations during the daytime, at night “whilst others are sleeping,” this artist

will lean on his table, gazing on the paper with “exactly the same gaze as he directed just now at

the things about him,” and brandishes “his pencil, his pen, his brush” hurriedly, vigorously,

actively, for fear that “the images might escape him, quarrelsome though alone, and driving

himself relentlessly on” (402).

Poe’s narrator and Baudelaire’s artist as flâneurs bear some resemblance to each other: both of

the two figures enjoy observing the appearance, dress, countenance, behaviors, gait, or gestures

of other people in the city. Like convalescents, they both possess “a childlike

perceptiveness…that is acute and magical by its very ingenuousness” (Baudelaire 402). Viewed

from another perspective, Poe’s narrator is different from Baudelaire’s artist in that the former

situates himself in a fixed location watching others with a certain aloofness and detachment,

whereas the latter walks directly into the crowd, enjoys “the ebb and flow” of the throng and

revealing his empathy (Baudelaire 399).

In his interpretation of Poe’s and Baudelaire’s writing on flâneur, Benjamin declares in “The

Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” that

This unknown man is the flâneur. That is how Baudelaire interpreted him when, in his essay on

Guys, he called the flâneur “l’homme des foules.” But Poe’s description of this figure is devoid

of the connivance which Baudelaire had for it. To Poe the flâneur was, above all, someone who

does not feel comfortable in his own company. (Benjamin 48)

As John Rignall insightfully points out, Baudelaire in the text of “The Painter of Modern Life”

never gives the reader any hints that he reads Poe’s old man as the flâneur (Rignall 116); instead,

the narrator should be closer to the flâneur in Baudelaire’s mind. Benjamin’s reading the old

man as the flâneur should be based on his own reading or deliberate mis-reading of Baudelaire.




10

In the later revision in “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin modifies his previous argument

by saying that

Baudelaire saw fit to equate the man of the crowd…with the flâneur. It is hard to accept this

view. The man of the crowd is no flâneur. In him, composure has given way to manic behavior.

Hence he exemplifies, rather, what had to become of the flâneur once he was deprived of the

milieu to which is belonged. (Benjamin 128)

Nevertheless, even in this partial self-correction, Benjamin refuses to read Poe’s narrator as the

flâneur. If he has ever done so, Benjamin still attempts to read this flâneur as “an unwilling

detective” who requires such a mask or guise of “watchfulness” to justify his apparent

“idleness” or “indolence” (Benjamin 40-41). Furthermore, linking, or mixing, Poe’s detective

with Baudelaire’s artist, Benjamin devalues both by emphasizing how the detective of modern

life “catches things in flight,” dreaming that he himself is “like an (graphic) artist,” whose

“swift crayon” everyone praises (Benjamin 40-41). In this way, there seems to be no true

leisurely, aimlessly strolling flâneurs with artistic taste either in Poe’s or in Baudelaire’s writings.

Nor is there any such figures in modern capitalist society, where all human beings, despite their

gender or class or social status, are turned into consumers browsing through the merchandises

with empty eyes, or worse, reified into commodities publicly displayed waiting for a suitable

buyer.

Is the Shopper a Flâneur?—Shopping vs. Flânerie in Urban Spaces

Since the activity of flânerie incorporates elements of walking or strolling in urban spaces to

leisurely observe the “spectacle of the city” or to be observed, it seems to resemble shopping

experience in the mall in certain ways, for the modern shopping mall offers a spacious place for

the shoppers to walk or stroll at will, to look at the commodities on display, to watch other

shoppers or to be gazed upon. I will explore the possible links between the figure of the shopper

and the flâneur as well as between the activity of shopping and flânerie.

1. The Time and Space for Shopping/Flânerie

Unlike the old man or narrator in Poe’s story who can walk the urban spaces of London at will

without being confined by natural temporal cycle or artificial clock time, the shopper who

haunts the shopping mall are bound to obey the time schedule regulated by mall administration,

usually from 10 or 11am to 10 or 11pm. In this way the shopper is much more constrained by

man-made hours than Poe’s potential flâneurs, who can walk all day and all night without

incurring any offence. In contrast to Baudelaire’s artist-flâneur, Constantin Guys, who rises

early to go to observe the crowd and paints at night from his memory of these people and things

he has observed, the shopper appears still relatively constrained concerning the strictly

controlled time he or she is allowed to stroll in the space of the shopping mall.

Benjamin’s flâneur, defined as a reified or commodified human being who becomes a consumer

in capitalist society looking for merchandises to purchase as well as for potential buyers who

need and pay for his expertise, appear closer to the shopper today. The shopper in today’s

capitalist society is a consumer, allured and dazzled by hundreds and thousands of merchandises

mass-produced by industries. Benjamin locates his flâneurs in glass-covered, gas-lighted

arcades in nineteenth-century Paris (Benjamin 37, 129). As Margaret Morse mentions in her

work on the relationships among the freeway, the mall, and television, Benjamin’s conception of

the arcade invites comparison with the mall (Morse 101). Through the space of arcades the




11

flâneurs are linked with the shoppers walking in the mall, since the modern shopping mall

develops from two origins: one from “the luxurious arcades built for the European bourgeoisie

in the nineteenth century” as stated by Benjamin, and the other from the “emporia or department

stores in which mass produced household commodities and clothing became available in

settings designed as palaces of consumption” (Shields 1992a: 3). The mall, indeed, can be

viewed as “a displacement and the enclosure of the walkable street and a collective site in which

to cash in the promises of the commodities….the mall is a miniature suburbia” (Morse 119).

However, different from the arcades which still belong to the realm of public space, shopping

malls as privately owned property gradually adopt “the guise of public space” and also “take

over its social roles” (Shields 1992a: 105). The shoppers as flâneurs stroll about the space

designed for making commercial interest on the part of the designer and mall owner, yet they

sometimes appropriate this private-turned-public space with their own purposes.

2. The Shopper/Flâneur’s Identity: Socio-Economic Dimension

It is clearly seen that today’s shoppers to the shopping mall are more diverse in their socio-

economic identities than the flâneurs portrayed by Poe and Baudelaire. The typical model of the

flâneur fashionable in the nineteenth century is a gentleman of the leisure class, dressed as a

dandy, carrying a stick and sometimes a turtle to set the pace for their walking (Benjamin 54). In

contrast, the shoppers comprise of people at various ages with various backgrounds from

working class to the middle or upper class, both male and female. In this way, the possible range

of shoppers in terms of social or economic dimension is much broader and the boundaries less

strict than the flâneur in nineteenth-century cities such as London or Paris.

Several commentators have criticized the overwhelming tendency of assuming the flâneurs as

male strollers coming from the leisure class, and have argued how the figures of women as

flâneuses, usually from the middle class, also frequent the department stores or arcades, whether

to simply purchase commodities or to show off the economic status of their husbands. Today’s

shoppers, no longer exclusively the male flâneurs of the past, are composed of flâneurs-turned

consumers from both genders.

3. The Shopper/Flâneur’s Intention and Activities in Shopping Malls

The shoppers come to the shopping mall with much more diverse intentions than the seemingly

“aimless” flâneurs of Poe, Baudelaire, or Benjamin. They may look for real commodities to buy,

such as clothes, household equipments, or food; they may be attracted by the entertainment

services such as video arcades, in-mall movie theaters, or children’s playground. In addition to

the ordinary consumption as expected and welcomed by mall designers and owners, the

shopper/flâneur may appropriate the “contradictory space” (put forth by Lefebvre) of the

shopping mall.

The concept of “contradictory space” is proposed by Henri Lefebvre in his work The Production

of Space (1991). Lefebvre states that when people leave the “space of production,” that is, the

workplace, they move to the “consumption of space (an unproductive form of consumption)” on

their holidays, and at this moment they will demand a “qualitative space,” seeking sun, woods,

sea, lake, mountain and the like in nature (352-53). The models of consumption are offered by

the middle class for the lower classes, who aspire to look like their social superiors through

mimesis. The opposition between exchange value of “abstract space” (e.g. work) and use value

of “absolute space” (e.g. leisure activities) is a dialectic one (356). It is not that exchange value

absorbs use value, but that “use re-emerges sharply at odds with exchange in space, for it




12

implies not ‘property’ but ‘appropriation’” (356). Such appropriation or “co-optation ” (368) of

space produces a “contradictory space.” There exist contradictions in society, contradictions

between “one thing and another,” between “the forces and relations of production,” and thus

create the “contradictions of space” (358). The contradiction lies in the conflict between a

consumption of space which engenders “surplus value” for the benefit of recreational industries

and one which produces “only enjoyment” and is consequently “unproductive” (359). Such is

the conflict between “capitalist utilizers” and “community users” (360).

The “unproductive” activities by the shoppers/flâneurs who create their own “contradictory

space” within the shopping mall indeed cover a wide range. First and foremost is the visual

pleasures, enjoyed by both ancient and modern flâneurs. As Sean Nixon points out, “Benjamin’s

use of allegory through the figure of the flâneur, in his analysis of the nineteenth-century

Parisian arcades, suggests an alternative way of reading the visual pleasures of shopping” (152).

The visual pleasures of the shoppers, as those of the flâneurs, lie in the opportunities to

observe/gaze/look at other people on the street, in the arcades or in the mall, as active subjects

driven by the scopic instinct verging on voyeurism. On the other hand, some of the shoppers

may also derive pleasure in being observed/gazed/looked at by other people, assuming the

position of objects on public display and driven by the instinct verging on exhibitionism.

The non-consuming elderly may walk from nearby apartments, and teenaged “mall jammers,”

“mall-rats or bunnies” may migrate from schools in the neighborhood of the mall to “match wits

with security personnel” (Shields 1992a: 5; Langman 58). They come to the mall to do more

looking than shopping, most often just to “kill time.” The malls become a primary hangout and

site of significant life events for the young adolescents, such as the first use of credit card,

driving a car to the mall, and first sexual experience in the parking lot or washroom (Langman

58). Other forms of appropriation of the mall for private use include looking for potential sexual

partner; utilizing free public facilities such as the washrooms and the bench for taking a rest;

taking exercise by “hiking” in the spacious mall; enjoying free air-conditioned, temperature-

and moisture- controlled environment against the harsh weather outside, such as rain, snow,

storm, coldness or heat; exploiting the safe and fully lighted space against the darkness and

dangerous traffic outside, and so on and so forth. As Jerry Jacobs argues in his The Mall: An

Attempted Escape from Everyday Life (1984), the mall is a potential resource for “bored

urbanities or suburbanites” when they attempt to escape from the “boredom, trivia or rigors of

everyday life” (Jacobs v).

Part II. Problematics of Shopping in Global Mall in Taipei

Global Mall: Facts, Its Ambition and Proclaimed Goals

Just opened last year, Global Mall is developed by the construction firm Kindom Group. It is

claimed to be the biggest shopping mall in suburban Taipei and the only one Japanese-style

shopping mall in Taiwan. Occupying 31,020 ㎡ space including some 79,200 ㎡ of enclosed

shopping areas, equipped with parking lots for 1,600 automobiles and 1,500 motorcycles,

Global Mall is about two times as big as MetroWalk, the same size as Taimall, and about one-

fourth as big as Living Mall. As the word “global” in its name implies, this shopping mall aims

at offering customers various products from the global market with the ambition to transform

the shopping habits and recreational activities of inhabitants living in the suburban areas in

Taipei County. Yu-Shan Ma, President of Global Mall, proudly proclaims that Global Mall as a

“complex community shopping mall combining entertainment and shopping” will not only




13

bring in the turnover of more than 50 billion but also radically change the shopping behavior

and leisure activities of local residents in Taipei County. Since Global Mall has not been in

operation for one year, it is difficult to appraise the actual profits the mall has been producing

for its owners and investors. Yet from my own experience and the comments by customers on

their on-line personal blogs, quite a few voices are raised against the mall itself. In the following

I will describe the actual shopping experience in Global Mall and the comments offered publicly

by various customers on-line.

Actual Shopping Experience in Global Mall

If the visitor goes to Global Mall by car or motorcycle, he or she will probably park the vehicle

in the parking lot of B1 and B3, and then it is very likely that the visitor will enter the mall from

B2 upward (for the floor plan of B2, see Fig. 1). When one enters the JUSCO shops on the

basement from the parking lot, one first encounters a security guard in strict military-like

uniform, who stands upright, wearing a severe facial expression and staring at the customers as

if everyone is a potential shoplifter. After browsing through the commodities in bookstore,

stationary shop, gift shop, and electronic equipments (all the while under the sharp surveillance

of the security guard), one may pick up some merchandise he or she wants to purchase. And

here comes a problem: where should one pay the money? With the unpaid merchandise in one’s

hand, looking about for the cashier, one feels the piercing gaze from the security guard coming

from somewhere as if one were going to shoplift this commodity. It is indeed an unpleasant

experience. If one keeps going forward, he or she will encounter a big supermarket, similarly

overseen by two other security guards in the same military-like uniform, one at the entrance into

and the other at the exit out of the supermarket. There is no clear boundary between the

supermarket and other shops on the same floor.

Passing in front of one security guard, one can go directly to the first floor of Global Mall by

escalator, stepping into the “fashion hall” with shops managed by JUSCO and others by Global

Mall (for floor plan of 1F see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). The corridor is spacious and straight through

from one end to the other, sided by shops or stores along the wall and display counters in the

middle. The only choice one can make in strolling about this floor is to walk straight forward to

one end, taking a left or right turn and walk back to the starting point through the corridor of the

other side. One may just walk in a circuit along the corridors, nothing more. It does not take

much time for one to finish strolling and browsing through all the shops on the first floor.

Choosing from the three escalators going upstairs, one then reaches the second floor, and

immediately finds that one can look almost straight through to either end of the floor (for the

floor plan of 2F see Fig. 2). The same “standardization,” “gray-on-gray quality” of the shops

and stores, to use Jerry Jacobs’ words (6), are exhibited. What dazzles one’s eyes are the

indistinguishable, similarly fashionableand colorful commodities, giving the impression of

sameness in every store, even on every salesperson’s face. Similar sensual perceptions can be

observed when one strolls along the corridors on the third floor, whereas on the fourth floor, the

highest one, one finds the first-run theater and fancy restaurants with cuisines from the globe

(for floor plans of 3F and 4F, see Fig. 3). Visiting the mall from the basement up to the fourth

floor, strolling all its corridors and pass by all the shops or stores, one is overwhelmed by its

large enclosed spaces, spacious corridors, brightly lit ceilings, polished tile floor, and countless

merchandises on display. After finishing the first round, which takes less than two hours, one

somehow is not quite motivated to continue tracing one’s previous steps and strolling about the

same spaces in the same routes. “All look so much the same,” one contemplates in the mind,




14

“nothing special, nothing interesting that is worth re-visiting.”

Similar attitude toward shopping in Global Mall can be observed from the article posted by

various customers in online personal blogs, to the effect that the mall is big but boring, spacious

but dull: in an one-hour tour you can already finish strolling all the shopping areas, the

supermarket in the basement included; there is not much pleasure, much less excitement as

should be expected in ordinary street shopping, shopping in other supermarkets, or in other

“authentic” American-style shopping malls (such as the Mall of America in Minneapolis,

which is the biggest shopping mall in the United States). Other complaints by shoppers include:

the commodities not as attractive as those in Taipei 101 or Breeze Center; the sight of many

shoppers wearing slippers and casual clothes to the mall; the mixing together of higher-class and

lower-class brands; more like RT-Mart Supermarket rather than department store; the poor

design of shopping route, especially in the JUSCO supermarket; and the food sold in the food

court even more expensive than that sold in upper-class Hsin-Yi District, and so on.

The Problematics of Shopping in Global Mall

To account for the disappointment felt by shoppers to Global Mall, my main argument is that the

shopper shopping in the mall in contemporary consumerist, post-capitalist, post-modern cities or

metropolises bears certain resemblance to the figure of flâneur discussed by Poe, Baudelaire and

Benjamin, who walks/strolls on the streets or in the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, London,

or other capital cities. Furthermore, the shopper/flâneur enjoys the pleasure obtained from

creating infinite possibilities of his or her unique, personal routes with his or her own body

within the space of shopping malls, just as a poet, writer or artist creating poems, texts or works

of art with his or her pen or brushes. Such an understanding of the activity of shopping in urban

spaces help to explain the cause of the disappointment or complaints by the shoppers in Global

Mall: First, the spatial arrangement of stores and designs of shopping route fail to offer the

shoppers such freedom and pleasure in designing and creating their own shopping routes; and

second, the display shelves and counters located in the middle of the mall are rather short in

height, forcing the shopper standing in between to be nearly fully exposed to the gaze of other

people, which, together with the surveillance gaze of the security guards, contribute to a sense

of insecurity and uneasiness in the shopper’s mind.

1. The Spatial Arrangement of Stores and Designs of Shopping Route

The first reason I propose to account for the mall’s failure in fulfilling the need of the customers

is that the spatial arrangement of stores and shops is too orderly and the designs of shopping

route are so much within expectation, which in turn offer very few possibilities for the shoppers

to create their own unique shopping routes. Inspired by de Certeau’s theory of “walking

rhetorics,” which draws analogy between walking and language, I argue that a pleasurable

shopping experience, like the activity of a flâneur or an artist, lies for the most part in the

shoppers’ ability to create infinite possibilities of routes with their bodies strolling through the

space, producing their own unique “works of art.” As Margaret Morse reads it, “de Certeau’s

very means of escape are now designed into the geometries of everyday life, and his figurative

practices of enunciation (‘making do,’ ‘walking in the city,’ or ‘reading as poaching’) are

modeled in representation itself” (Morse 101). Walking as an “evasive strategy of self-

empowerment,” as conceived by de Certeau, allows individuals in the city to “act out” their

originality, their definition of the world, their resistance to the fixed, constructed spatial

organization, and taking at least partial and temporary control.




15

Moreover, the shoppers resort to various “unproductive” ways of appropriating the spaces

within the shopping mall in addition to the “reproductive” activity of consumption anticipated

by capitalist industries. Rob Shields offers an insightful interpretation of de Certeau’s ideas of

textual “poaching” with regards to flânerie and window shopping:

Yet the conundrum of consumption spaces, be they markets or malls, is their appropriation as

sites of deflected and displaced resistance. Even the most disadvantaged have demonstrated an

ability to steal the opportunity for pleasure in the “clever art” of appropriation; an invasive

“poaching” of luxurious and “climatized” environments (air-conditioned and heated, humidified

and dehumidified until just right) through vicarious observation, gratuitous flânerie and window

shopping, or cheap luxury. (Shields 1992a: 12-13)

With these tactics, the shopper not only creates his or her own private space within the apparent

public space but also produces a Lefebvrean “contradictory space” appropriated for his or her

own secrete purposes, such as undertaking forms of “neo-flânerie” (Wolff 1985, qtd. in Shields

1992a: 13), “skirting the security patrols,” “occasionally taking over washing rooms as

temporary, informal brothels in the hope of intercepting the odd affluent male” (Shields 1992a:

12-13), or “assuming the guise and mask of middle-class shoppers by carrying shopping bags”

(Shields 1989).

Such possibilities, nevertheless, are denied to the shoppers in Global Mall. On account of the

virtually rectangular shape of the site and huge space, the plans for each floor are designed with

spacious corridors straight through one end to the other end. The shoppers are left with little

choice but mindlessly follow the steps of the pedestrians in front of them, only at times slowing

down or at times speeding up their paces, or occasionally deviating into restrooms or stopping

by food stores. They are generally walking straight and taking turns as other shoppers do, and

would finish one round of strolling all the shopping areas on a certain floor within a short time.

Do the shoppers desire to cruise the same corridors and shops all over again? Not quite, for

there are few possibilities for them to find excitement, adventure, risk, or pleasure when they are

walking within the space fixed by mall designers, whose designs render the shoppers powerless.

The shoppers lose the “zombie effect” defined as “floating for hours, a loss of a sense of time

and space” by Kowinski (qtd. in Morse 110), which the activity of “malling” might provide

them as an attempted escapes from the boredom of everyday life.

2. The Shopping Experience of Gazing and Being Gazed at

The second reason, partly related to the first one is that although the mall is spacious, the shape

of its floors is rectangular and divided into three main shopping districts—right, middle, and left.

The stores and shops along the walls look just like the usual shopping streets, except that they

are universally clean, dazzlingly new, and similarly styled. The shopping areas in the middle,

however, leave something to be desired. The design of the displaying shelves and counters are

short in height; this feature is similar to those in department stores but when combined with the

gigantic space within the mall itself, the customers can have an almost full view of all the shops,

stores, shelves and counters in front of them when they look straight forward. Seen from another

perspective, while the customers may easily gaze or observe other shoppers, they are equally

easily gazed back at or observed by others. As Merleau-Ponty indicates, the subject sees the

objects in the world by carrying his or her own body which is inscribed in the visible world

surrounding him or her. Situating him or herself within the large space of the shopping mall and

gaining control over the countless merchandise with the touch of the eyes, the shopper-subject

with corporeal body existing in space cannot avoid being exposed to the gaze or return gaze




16

from other subjects or even objects.

Furthermore, excluding the invisible surveillance cameras which are bound to be installed at

several places within the mall, the security guards in military-like uniform actually constitute

something resembling what Michel Foucault describes of Bentham’s Panopticon, formerly

exploited in prisons, armies or schools as a form of control and discipline (Foucault 1980: 161-

62). The visible bodies of the security guards seem to be more threatening than the invisible

existence of surveillance cameras. Whereas the shopper may not consciously perceive the

prevalence of surveillance cameras hidden somewhere which keep monitoring every slight

movement of the shopper, the acute and aggressive gaze from the conspicuous security guards

with long faces can never be taken for granted with ease.

Paradoxically, Foucault points out that the design of Panopticon is more powerful than the

ordinary surveillance by guards, since it leads to the internalization of self-discipline by the

prisoners or soldiers under surveillance. In this line of reasoning, who is or even whether there

is anyone situated in the central tower watching over each cell of the Panopticon no longer

carries importance; the point is to create an atmosphere or feeling that one seems to be

constantly under watchful eyes without being able to see where that gaze comes from or whose

gaze it is. If such an argument is true, then why do shoppers strolling in the mall feel more

uncomfortable with the presence of security guards than with the invisible surveillance

cameras?

To explore the issue we need to categorize two types of shoppers: potential shoplifters and

honest shoppers. It may be expected that potential shoplifters will be very conscious of both

security guards and surveillance cameras, since the former might catch them in the act of

shoplifting whereas the latter will record the scene of their misdemeanor. The Foucauldean

notion of “internalized gaze or discipline” thus proves true in the case of potential offenders. For

honest shoppers (which constitute the majority of mall-goers), however, the surveillance

cameras matter little since they do not intend to commit any crime. It is the presence of security

guards, their gaze, instead, that disturbs the honest shoppers when they are strolling in the

shopping areas. Why the difference? Where does this disturbance come from? It probably

derives from the internal sense of “guilt” for not “shopping” but just “looking around” on the

part of the shoppers. Although “not purchasing anything” does not constitute an offence against

criminal law, it might be disapproved of in terms of the norm established by capitalist,

consumerist society, which dictates that consumers should contribute to economic development

by purchasing commodities produced by industries.

Accordingly, shoppers who make no purchase but just look around, enjoying the air-conditioned

environment or appropriating the space for “unproductive” activities (Lefebvre 359), may

appear “guilty” in the eyes of mall managers and owners. The shoppers who do not have

specific targets for purchasing but appear to be hanging around are especially conscious of the

disapproving gaze from the security guards. The security guards as human beings who might

approach any suspicious shoppers at any time constitute a threat to honest shoppers in that the

shoppers feel censored for not purchasing anything and that they fear some of their unconscious

or unintentional behavior may be misunderstood as “shoplifting” by the gaze of the security

guards.

In either case, it is as if one’s gestures, motions, or even directions of eyes are under intensive

surveillance from all sides without the slightest power of resistance on the part of the shopper. It

is such a feeling of being gazed at easily that produces a sense of insecurity and uneasiness in

the customer as if he or she were situated in a prison. Small wonder this disciplinary force only




17

drives the shoppers to quicken their pace to go out of sight of the panoptical gaze of the

controlling power.

Conclusion

Motivated by the attempt to account for the problematics of shopping in Global Mall, I have

appropriated de Certeau’s “walking rhetorics,” Benjamin’s discourse on flâneur (referring back

to Poe and Baudelaire), Lefebvre’s “contradictory space,” and Foucault’s notion of panopticon,

to explore the possible connections between shopping and flânerie, between walking and

language/artistic creation, between body and space, as well as between seeing subject and the

object seen. As cited by Benjamin of a travel guide of Paris, the arcade is “a city, even a world,

in miniature” (Benjamin 37). Developed from Italian or Parisian arcades in the past, modern

shopping malls still preserve such an element of “world in miniature,” in which one can, like a

leisurely flâneur, observe multitude of mall walkers passing by as he or she strolls the spacious,

enclosed mall.

The failure of Global Mall in Taipei in satisfying the need and desire of the shoppers is also

dealt with in this paper. The shoppers come to the mall in search for a space as an attempted

escape from the trivia of daily life, a space for them to “get lost” without the rational sense of

time and space, and a space for them to practice “operations of walking” and create their own

inimitable paths or texts/works of art with their bodies, much like an ingenious poet or artist

with a pen or brush. If the designers of commercial spaces cannot meet with such unconscious

desires of the shoppers, they will lose the customers in the long run. The individual users of

space, on one hand, possess the subversive power within the constructed, fixed organization of

urban spaces by resorting to various strategies of appropriation of the public spaces for their

own private use, as proposed by de Certeau and Lefebvre. On the other hand, when deprived of

some of the resisting power under the monitoring gaze of security guards or surveillance

cameras, they will lose pleasure and be unwilling to stay in the space any longer, as some

shoppers in JUSCO supermarket in Global Mall have already done.

Figure 1. JUSCO 1F & B2




18

Figure 2.

Global

Mall 1F

and 2F




19

Figure 3. Global Mall 3F and 4F

Works Cited

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The Shoppers as Flaneur?-Dialectics between Flaneur, … Su.pdf · space, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, ... that by using “spectator” instead of “reader,”