On September 5, 2024, the Royalmount opened its doors to the public. A “destination art de vivre”, a “district”, where you can find a “gourmet offering”, a “public art trail” as well as a “rich and varied artistic and cultural program”, we can read on the website. In short, this is not a shopping center, the promoters of the project could have said. However, in such a context, the work of art is no longer one. It is part of a complex device of attraction and seduction. It is reduced to the state of an ingredient to create an ambiance, of visual entertainment to make us forget the other side of the place, the real reason for the place’s existence. It does not make us live a liberating sensory and emotional experience, likely to lead to reflection. But, above all, the term “public art” drives home the original lie of the shopping center: it presents itself as a public place, when it is a private place whose developers have only one real goal: to maximize sales per unit of surface area.
Located at the intersection of two busy highways, Royalmount is a regional shopping centre that is banking heavily on car traffic, just as it did in the early 1950s. Except that in its early years, this urban and architectural innovation was thought of in terms of decentralization. Rapid suburban development was making city centres congested. The shopping centre became a solution. The problem is that it became the solution.
Applied indiscriminately, it has caused a new set of problems. Most cities in North America have become, in terms of commercial vitality, like “donuts”: stuffed on the outside, empty in the center. The reason is simple. The shopping center has succeeded where city centers have failed: cleanliness, security, automobile accessibility. It could have been otherwise, but in addition to the subjugation of politics to the economy, it is the ideology of the consumer society that has favored this transformation of our cities. Indeed, it places comfort and security (think: SUVs) at the pinnacle to the detriment of exploration, discovery, openness, and a taste for otherness.
The worst was yet to come. Decentralization was followed by recentralization. Shopping centers began to imitate city centers with trees—plastic ones—fountains, cafes with “terraces,” imitation street furniture, etc. Movie theaters were added, and even libraries and other public services, as well as rides, skateboard parks and an indoor downhill ski slope. But when you add hotels, housing, a substitute for public space like a private park, and especially when you are as isolated as Royalmount, recentralization increasingly resembles ghettoization.
This is what creative destruction can lead to in an overly liberal economy. According to this theory, economic growth is generated by innovation that creates the most efficient by destroying the least efficient. The problem here is that we are destroying public spaces designed to promote living together — city centers — in favor of private spaces designed to make capital grow.
Hyper-fetishization
The shopping mall is life in parentheses: the connection with space and time is broken. We are in a non-place, in the sense of anthropologist Marc Augé. Few things remind us that we are in Montreal. Outside, there is nothing to do. We can just take a car or a metro. There is no sign of history, no monument, no commemorative plaque, as in a city centre. There is only commercial symbolism. Only trademarks carry identity.
There are no elements that symbolize social life. And, especially, no reminder of authority, civil or religious, current or past, that is to say, no signs of social structuring other than that of goods. No town hall, no cathedral. No, we do not contemplate it from the outside, to reflect on the question of emancipation. We have entered a new cathedral, that of modern times. We make a financial, temporal and psychic sacrifice to follow contemporary rituals. To do as the others do. The shopping center has become the new (non-)common place.
Like its religious ancestor, the shopping mall invites us to escape our materiality. But, on top of that, it does the same thing for merchandise. The process of fetishization reaches its climax there. They are detached from their conditions of production, and have a life of their own, by the very principle of exchange on a mass market. The first time, by the producer who gives it, through advertising and the trademark, almost magical properties. The merchandise is fetishized a second time by its simple arrangement on a retail display. That would be more than enough, but the process of fetishization of the merchandise is further reinforced when the store is located in a shopping mall.
Through this three-tiered hyper-fetishization, we ensure a resilient forgetting of the conditions of production on the part of the individual. The latter can therefore devote all of his cognitive and affective resources to choosing between different objects. At a pinch, he asks himself the question “do you really need it?”, but never “why do you think you need it?”. But, above all, nothing encourages him to question the extent of the negative effects of consumption. The stifling heat of the city center and its homeless people are far away.
Back to the future
The Royalmount promises us “inclusive luxury”. A nice oxymoron, which relies on the most powerful levers of the functioning of ideologies in our time: irony and cynicism. They allow those who practice them to detach their actions from their thoughts, and therefore to practice the behavioral prescriptions of an ideology, and to enjoy them, but without adhering to them. A supreme freedom, in a way, but reserved in this case for those who can afford true luxury.
For others, this formula is part of a relatively classic sadistic marketing strategy. We don’t just dissatisfy the consumer. We make him suffer. It would therefore be more accurate to speak of incisive luxury. For those who cannot afford their luxury desires, that is to say the vast majority, the luxury boutiques of Royalmount function like what we could call commercial pornography: we look, but we don’t buy.
Nevertheless, fantasies are constantly fed, and dissatisfaction is reproduced in ever more emotionally charged forms. It is a basic principle, but it takes audacity and talent to implement it. It is worth taking the risk, because it is very effective in turning the wheel of consumption.
Ultimately, the shopping mall presents itself as what it is not. It appears not only as a public place, but also as a place that meets all human needs, whether practical, hedonic, social, cultural, even spiritual. The place par excellence where one exercises one’s freedom. But, above all, it implicitly presents itself as the incarnation of social progress.
However, if we scratch the surface a little, the opposite is obvious. This is not a social life could be the title of this (theatrical) performance. It is a simulacrum, a simulation. The shopping center does not seek to bring us together, on the contrary it divides us. It segments, it targets, it positions itself, it differentiates itself, it develops strategies, it applies tactics. It succeeds. It therefore leads us into debt and stress, makes us miss the essential, puts us in competition with each other, among other things.
The shopping mall is the most spectacular incarnation of consumer society. Of a regressive society. But which nevertheless continues to reproduce itself. Always in more or less the same way, according to the model invented in the 1950s. Seventy years later, can we really change the model, finally? Do we want to? Really?