Meditations in an American Mall

(a performance lecture)

Jean Baudrillard

Address unknown

Dear Mr. Baudrillard,

Today is Saturday, November 9, 2024, and while I write these lines I find myself at the very heart of the unconscious of middle America, sitting on a shopping mall bench somewhere between Eddie Bauer and The Cheesecake Factory, thinking about how hyperreality is not what it used to be. Not that it is dead; far from it.  Like a hydra, now it has grown new heads.

When I was 9 years old, in 1980, the Perisur shopping center opened in the south side of Mexico City— a big event at the time. It was an ambitious architectural complex and urban development that emulated the modern American mall. I remember the day my dad drove us to see it, me with the same excitement with which we drove to the Sierra del Ajusco one day so I could witness snow for the first time in my life (we only found a small mound).  The opening of Perisur was just as rare of an event; I remember the hours-long line of cars trying to gain access into the parking lot.

At a time (pre-NAFTA) when it was difficult and expensive to access American products in Mexico, Perisur felt like an exclusive, high-end commercial oasis, a place that offered Mexican shoppers the opportunity to be “modern”. It is important to consider how, when one grows up in the so-called periphery, there is a deep social comparison dynamic, where one values oneself based on the latest fashions and news from the so-called center, be it Europe or the United States. Simply being there gave one a greater sense of self, the sophistication of the cosmopolitan cultural tourist.  At that mall I remember seeing a wealthy family (they looked foreign, maybe American) loading their shopping bags onto a nice van,  and me thinking  how they looked taller, prettier, richer than the rest of us.  I think about the aspirations of class and lifestyle that are culturally coded as white that to this day are still sold as merchandise to Black and brown people as I am witnessing right now in this mall.

What was the original lure of the mall for me? For starters, in the urban context where I grew up, where being a teenager out in the urban wilderness of the city and its attendant, potential danger, the mall offered a sense of safety. It definitely was for us a third place, just like the term Ray Oldenburg coined in the 1980s: a place that is not work nor home, but somewhere in between. It was the mall where I first got a sense of freedom and agency, where I went to see my first movies with my friends (I remember going to see Weird Science with my friend Ruy, in 1985; a movie, weirdly also, about sexual simulacra).

But after all these years I also realize the extent to which that odd form of FOMO I sought to satisfy by going to malls: ultimately a desperate desire, I think, to be contemporary. During those pre-internet years, exoticized as of late with series like Stranger Things, the frustration of not being able to be at the center of something new, and the desire to embody newness, were very real for me.  Those shiny escalators, those transparent elevators and reflective materials (such as those from the Edmonton Mall in Canada that once fascinated Dan Graham), offered dreams of presentness. My generation continued to search for that high of presentness over the years in TV, glossy magazines, newspapers, up to and until the advent of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle.

The following year after Perisur opened, in 1981, you, Jean Baudrillard, published Hypermarket and Hypercommodity in Simulacra and Simulation.  A decade or so later I would spend my college nights plowing through your writings in my art theory class, with difficulty and increased anxiety and depression produced by your harsh judgment on commodity fetishism, the relinquishing of independence and authenticity, and the overall vacuousness of the shopping mall, which was in turn a judgment on my own vacuousness.  I had a hard time admitting to myself that I liked malls anyway, that I felt at home amidst that evil hyperreality. I assumed it was because I was stupid. But maybe it was because I am native to a country whose modernity was born out of colonization, the imposition of another perception of reality onto its own, which is something that I instinctively understood. I always was comfortable with, and in fact needed, multivalence.

Or maybe it was because my mind never felt imprisoned of  those purported simulations of reality: I am an artist who can make their own sense of every sign and symbol and make it their own, so in a place without reality rather feels like home to me. I did not mind giving my own meaning to empty images; in fact, when they are emptier, the better.   This is why I like chain hotels and nondescript places, to the horror of some people.

That is, until today.

As I sit here seeing this brick-and-mortar living monument of late 20^th century commerce at a time when the majority of that universe has moved online, your critique of the shopping mall as a simulacra now might feel to some as a bit quaint, almost like a guided tour of one of those fake historic town recreations that one can visit to learn about how people in the 16^th or 17^th centuries lived. One might feel like one is in a Renaissance fair of hyperreality, one where we can have nostalgia of the time when we used to have nostalgia of the real. And you might have even agreed that your own ideas might not have aged well after the arrival of the internet. But sitting here I have been thinking that they were actually prescient. This becomes even the clearer to me today , when I am back in this desert of the real in the post-truth era.

The anatomy of grief would likely place personal loss as the most consequential in human life: the instances when one has lost a loved one. Aside from death there is heartbreak, which has its own version of loss—and which, when definitive and irreversible, is accompanied by feelings of perceived failure and lack of self-worth. I have experienced both of those feelings, at different moments of my life, in the very city where I write these words now.  I am no stranger to them. And now I am writing these words amidst a place that is familiar to practically anyone who has grown up in the capitalist world, the non-place of a shopping mall, in a suburb of Chicago, which has sometimes been called the most American of cities.  To an extent, at least as far as this reflection is concerned, it feels to me like the best of places to be at the worst of times.  When Ernest Hemingway wrote The Old Man and the Sea he sequestered himself in Villa del Cubero, a microscopic town amidst the New Mexico desert, as far as possible from the sea, to write the novel. I now happen to be in a non-place to write about out search for place and purpose.

As I write in this moment of deep, collective political grief, I remember what an artist friend said in a group conversation yesterday: [true] “darkness is when you don’t see anything bad happening”. This comment really disturbed me because it felt so true. I look at all these people swarming up and down the mall,  shuttling from Charlotte Russe to Primark and from Abercrombie & Fitch to Forever 21 and looking at their faces, asking myself whether this or that person voted for Trump, whether they realize what they had done, what we have done to ourselves. As I see the first Christmas trees of the season, the aroma of Sbarro and Cinnabon and people buying cheap jewelry and jeans, I am reminded of the character of Traudl Junge (Hitler’s secretary) played by Alexandra Maria Lara in the movie Downfall, when, in the middle of an alcohol-infused, swing dance party organized by Eva Braun under heavy Soviet bombardment of Berlin in the final hours of the war, suddenly is seized by panic and horror, telling her friend: “this is so unreal, like a dream from which you cannot wake up.”  

Which makes me think that, in spite of all my accidental cultural circumstances that I once felt gave me the edge on this issue, I feel I have now lost that ability to exist fluidly between reality and simulacra as I once thought.  This has been borne out with the advent, as previously mentioned, of this era of post-truth, where feelings and emotions have vanquished facts, where it no longer matters whether we can win an argument with reason and instead we are drowning in an avalanche of falsities and conspiracy theories. You yourself might have considered this moment, perhaps, as the triumph of hyperreality.

The one thing I cling to:  years later, when you wrote The Transparency of Evil, you hinted that irony and humor might help us overcome the domination of the hyperreal, and  I sincerely hope you are right. Many of us who are drifting amidst today’s tsunami of disinformation and escapism, are clearly aware that this is a dream of unreason that produces monsters, and are thus holding on to the practice of radical awareness so that we can wake up make the present real, the stranger things familiar, and embrace undeterred illusions again.

Sincerely,

PH