Once-upon-a-Time in the Commodity World: An Unofficial Guide to Mall ofAmerica

This paper provides an account of the contemporary operation of the commodity aesthetic through a critical reading of Mall of America, the largest themed retail and entertainment complex in the U.S. Inspired by Walter Benjamin's analysis of nineteenth century arcades, I argue that the modern megamall is a dreamhouse of the collectivity, where fantasies of authentic life are displaced onto commodities that are fetishized in the spatial, anthropological, and psychological senses. Vital to these processes is the construction of temporal-spatial contexts, or chronotopes of consumption, which include the spatial archetypes of Public Space, Marketplace, and Festival Setting, and temporal archetypes of original Nature, Primitiveness, Childhood, and Heritage. Within these contexts, fetishism operates through themes of transport, both bodily in terms of motion and travel, and imaginatively in the form of memory and magic. Following a critique of a failure of dialectic thinking in existing literature on commodity consumption, I provide a dialectical “reading” of Mall of America, and outline its implications for a progressive political engagement with the contemporary retail built environment.