If you think we have had enough of the shopping malls now that the holidays are over, think again. The attraction of malls is a slow, endemic fever. It may subside but it well never go away.
The spaces we construct around us define what we are. Today’s shopping malls are the most recent in a line of “sites of commerce” that, in our case, have included the early tabo or periodic market, the tiangui (Spanish mercado) or permanent market, and the commercial strip or Main Street (the Escolta, Avenida, or Magallanes of Philippine cities and towns). The shifts from one to the other figure changes in the world of goods, reorientations of public places, alterations in our patterns of consumption and rhythms of sociality.
One form does not completely give way to the other. In our city, tabo, tiangui, strip and mall do not only coexist, we sometimes find them lumped together. The old survives in the new, even if dimly. There is something of the strip in the long, boxlike SM malls (look at Cebu’s SM City or Metro Manila’s SM Megamall), where shoppers are pedestrians going up and down a main street (or descending and ascending for this is a multilevel thoroughfare), wandering into sidestreets and back. Ayala Center in Cebu or Ayala Glorietta in Makati evoke markets in their maze of passageways, though more radial than linear, the pedestrians spun around in irregular spokelike streets.
Malls tend to be generic and modular even as, here and there are malls (Sydney’s Queen Victoria Mall, Toronto’s Eaton Mall, or, grander still, Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele) that aspire to a distinctive signature of place. Cebu’s Ayala Center is supposed to conjure a “southern-comfort” ambience befitting its location yet seems more apt for a plantation society like Negros or Iloilo than a place more philistine than feudal like Cebu.
Like other received structures, malls can yield to cultural pressures. Virra Mall in Greenhills or Lucky Plaza in Singapore are modern versions of the crowded, noisy Oriental bazaar, quite unlike American suburban malls with their chilly aura of empty spaces. While certain cultures take pride in the luxury of open spaces, Asians seem inclined to see space as something to be filled, finding comfort in the intimate and the cluttered. In this manner, malls can be cannibalized.
Even as cultural tension exists, malls draw us inexorably into new rhythms of moving and desiring. The old tabo informed our lives with a cycle of consumption linear and episodic. The tiangui had a rhythm less segmented and discontinuous than the tabo, yet such were the routines of daily life and the cycles of supply (think of unrefrigerated fish) that a certain linearity persisted. Commerce had predictable ebbs and flows, and busy mornings gave way to stagnant afternoons.
The malls are something else. They are no longer just sites of commerce but “cities” of leisure and aimlessness where people consume not just material goods but other things as well — moments of ease, bright surfaces, illusions of luxury, sociality (or its apparitions), amusement, anonymity. One visits a mall not on the simple economic impulse “to buy something” but “to go shopping”, a more elastic, amorphous urge that includes what the young call “hanging out” and “cruising.”
For business reasons, malls are designed to favor a free, unstructured, open-ended circulation of people. Yet, they nurture a distinctly decentered experience where what is important is not so much one’s destination as movement itself.
Urging us into motion without closure, malls are a form of entrapment. I recall a late evening in the cavernous Ocean Terminal in Hong Kong. Exhausted after a day of shopping, we rested on the steps of one of the mall’s nodal plazas and watched tired shoppers relentlessly marching to and fro. One of my daughters remarked that they all looked like they were frantically searching for exits that did not exist. A wry and perfect insight. Malls are our postmodern Labyrinth.
Though I frequent it quite often, I am too old and unreconstructed to be a creature of the mall. I take a straight line to the coffeeshop or bookshop and then take the straight line back and out. My daughters say I am such a drag as company as I gripe about the slow, circuitous, decentered way they move through a mall. Malls are such “feminine” places. I prefer the clear economic destination and return.
We have devised a compromise. When the family goes to the mall, my daughters promptly unload me at my favorite coffeeshop — my “daycare center,” they love to say — as they go off “shopping.” They take their time and come around to pick me up when they are ready to head home.
Derelict in space ruled by a strange law of motion, I while away the time sketching the idle cartography of a new world.
14 January 1996
House of Memory: Essays
Resil B. Mojares
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Filed under: Quotes, books, resil mojares
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