Anything but Ordinary: Hegemony at Riverside Square Mall
Copyright 2002 Mauricio Rosales


In "Reading the Shopping Mall City," Nancy Backes expresses a key dilemma in the critical interpretation of a challenging text, especially when that text is, essentially, a large building. She asks, "If the shopping mall is a text, and, specifically, an encoded text [. . .] how shall we read it?" (1) Backes response to this question is interesting, yet decidedly sidesteps an important element. At various instances, she refers to the mall as a transmitter of culture, a shopper's paradise to escape the chaos of daily life in a postmodern world, a space which the individual "re-appropriates" in an effort to construct a self, and as a place where a woman might find the opportunity and space to resist the imposition of male values. There is little acknowledgement here of anything but a rather positive transaction between the mall and the individual. Backes even suggests that, for the individual, the mall "offers more democratic hope and possibility" (1), likening it to the free-play allowed the viewer by abstract art. She dismisses the staunch critic's portrayal of mall shoppers as "duped, doped and lulled"(2) Yet, in giving the individual shopper (reader) the power to transform the text (mall), she does so by downplaying a "darker" aspect of meaning (author's intent) in the mall's ties to market capitalism and the latter's continuous effort to preserve hegemony.

In contrast, a Marxist approach to the reading of the mall as text focuses primarily--almost by definition--on the criticism of this capitalist hegemony and its attendant ideologies: consumerism and class. To Terry Eagleton, for example, the task of the Marxist critic is, precisely, "to expose hidden biases and distortions in that which is given [the text] and to reveal it as alien, forced, fabricated" (Litowitz 13). This radical, critical stance is determined in large part by the Marxist conception of hegemony itself. In Marxism, hegemony is essentially a suspect social and cultural condition, in both its nature and practice. The various definitions given to hegemony by Marxist critics (from Antonio Gramsci to recent critics like Frederic Jameson) all concur on hegemony's negative elements such as manipulation, control, dominance. Antonio Gramsci, in The Prison Notebooks, for example, says hegemony is a "spontaneous consent by the masses to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group" (Cuneo). This consent, in turn, allows for "the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world, so that those who are subordinated by it accept is as commonsense" (Chandler). Once attained, hegemony must be won continuously because the narrow needs of the dominant group are not uniformly shared by those who are dominated. In this dynamic, the needs of the dominated are subordinated (if not neglected) creating a condition that could give rise to revolutionary sentiments that might threaten the hegemony. As a result, in a hegemonic condition, "an unjust arrangement is internalized and [made more palatable] in schools, churches, [. . .]museums and centers of popular culture" (Litowitz 2). Hegemonic domination is thus disseminated through the various political, social and cultural institutions. Such an institution is the shopping mall-in particular, Riverside Square in Paramus, New Jersey.

It is the subordinated group's unquestioning acceptance of the dominant group's world view as commonplace that gives the effects of hegemony on the individual their "invisibility." To the individual, the state of things appears to be what it is; there is a natural, expected, logical aspect to it. This seems to work to such a degree that, to the individual, imagining the state of things to be otherwise is very difficult, and makes the workings and effects of hegemony hard to pin-point in their subliminal, silent, and hidden aspect. Hegemony's dynamic, however, is nonetheless fully at work, and the individual's experience on a shopping trip to Riverside Square is not as simple nor as static as it might appear. It is an experiential process in which individuals, in a seemingly willful act of exercising their freedom, do so at the risk of compromising that freedom through hegemonic appropriation. Thus, the shopping visit to a mall is a subtle "buying into" and an active involvement with the ideological values of consumerism, consumption, class which are that it is a good thing to shop, to buy and to own. Consumerism, consumption and class may begin their hegemonic work far from Riverside Square, but their effects heighten once individuals reach the parking lot.

The parking lot at Riverside Square-as with most suburban malls-is an revealing place to begin noting the hegemonic process at work. Four large parking lots (one for each of the Cardinal points) surround the building proper in an effect that has been likened to that of a moat around a castle (Kovinski 60). The function of a moat is to protect those within the castle walls and keep out those who are unwanted, like enemies. Its role is as preserver, but, more importantly, as excluder, as a barrier. But how does the parking lot/moat both preserve and exclude? In an attempt to provide a getaway from the urban chaos of cities or populated places, mall designers stationed most malls in suburban locations far from pedestrian hustle and bustle (Kovinski 139-140). This does two things: it entices people to come by providing a sense of uniqueness, yet keeps those who might not have the desired spending power out-those who cannot afford a car, riff-raff, the homeless, teens who need to be driven, bus riders. The latter, of course, are "enemies" of the mall because their lack of car ownership could well reflect their little spending power as consumers, rendering them undesirable. The invisible consequence of parking lots-exclusivity-especially feeds into Riverside Square's projected image as a fashionable place to shop. As a shopping mall competing against other malls in Bergen and nearby counties, Riverside Square has chosen to take the high-end road in selling consumer products in contrast with the more middle-end Bergen Mall, Garden State and Paramus Park. Indeed, the Riverside Square website (shopriverside.com) provides a brief, one-paragraph, self-description titled, "About Us," in which the following words and phrases are used: "upscale" (three times) "lifestyle," "finest," "wealthiest," "plush," "fashion shopper," "creature comforts" and "lush." Whether high-end shoppers or a low-end ones, however, the individuals who park in a mall lot have already consented to assume the full role of consumers and to be targeted as such, thereby making possible the ideological abstraction of their individual identities into those of consumers. Even those who have no intention of shopping-a mom, say who merely wishes to stroll her toddler, a retiree out for some walking exercise in a climate controlled setting-also bring their consumer selves to the parking lot, just as much as those do who intend on shopping. In the very cars they own, and by which they identify themselves when leaving the mall ("Let's see, now, where did I park?") the emphasis is on their significance as consumers and on their consequent identification with the commodities they wish to purchase and own. This is even true down to the space they park in, where the sense of ownership would seem to be appropriate ("That's my spot!"). In reality, however, the parking lot is not a public space but a private one.

Once inside a mall, shoppers are further subjected to a wide array of designs and strategies calculated to seem natural, commonplace, benign, involving only the simple transaction of selling and buying. There is nothing inherently duplicitous in this transaction. Basic needs can be and are fulfilled through the acquisition of goods which meet those needs. Yet how does one explain the rampant acquisition of goods that do not meet basic needs? Perhaps the answer lies in the idea that a visit to the mall is "an encounter with social identity and definition" (Foster), with this provision: that this identity and definition be actualized inside a privatized space forged by the forces of a capitalist hegemony. Thus a visit to the mall is not like a group hike in the woods or a canoe trip down a wild river where the natural setting does not conceal anything but natural forces. The arbitrariness of nature is proof of its brutal honesty and indifference toward the individual. Arbitrariness, though, is not the web that holds the mall environment together, and there is anything but indifference in the way a mall impacts the individual visitor. The images projected by nature do not necessarily reflect the human. It is human nature to project humanity onto them. Yet, in a mall environment, the images perceived by the shopper have been articulated and designed to reflect a mirror image of the perceiver-not necessarily as the perceiver is, but as the perceiver may want to be. Working from a commercial concept based on competition and profit motive, a mall cannot, as an enterprise, afford anything that does not make consumption its ultimate goal. Toward this end, mall management and advertisers use a variety of strategies, tactics and designs. One of these is the manipulation of interior space.

As expressed by its slogan-"Anything But Ordinary"-the desired consumption at Riverside Square is one associated with high-class, chic, culture, sophistication; and the desired consumers are ones who subscribe to and invest in this image. To court these consumers, Riverside Square's interior space is designed to echo "a fine hotel lobby with retailing activity." The aim is to make the consumers feel as if they are traveling, in spite of the fact that they are not. The desirability of traveling to fine hotels in distant places recalls feelings of excitement and newness, both of which invoke an attitude of curiosity and exploration. Responding to this effect, even those who have come to Riverside Square to buy only one specific product are encouraged to dally, to explore and to browse. In this way, their visit might just result in more than one purchase. To enhance the feel of a fine hotel lobby, six seating areas have been placed on all three levels. These seating areas echo the styles of six well-known designers (Christian Dior being one of them), and reflect international locations, the Mediterranean, Asia. The seating areas are meant to provide respite for the shoppers, presumably tired from previous rounds of shopping and eager to replenish energy for the next round. They cannot be too comfortable, however, or the traffic of customers will not flow and buying will slow down. That is why, though stylish, the seating areas are also Spartan.

The issue of shopper relaxation, which takes on a literal aspect in the very seating areas and lighting effects, is not only a physical one, however. It is, on a more subtle level, an attempt at manipulating the issue of comfort in the hopes of appropriating the individual's sense of belonging, in the same way theme parks like Disney World do. By giving a familiar cast to what is essentially an alien environment, the mall provides a sense of orientation. In this regard, Riverside Square is no different from other malls, where, as William Kovinski has pointed out in The Malling of America, the friendly look of real Main Street has moved into mall promenades, and become the new Main Street. Yet, mall Main Street remains an echo of real Main Street, just as Riverside Square's interior is an echo of an actual, fine hotel lobby. The consumers, however, suspend their momentary disbelief, and give in to the space's apparent comfort and coziness. A climate-controlled environment (with every day at the same temperature and with no possibility of inclement weather) that adds to the predictability of finding comfort. This sense of comfort gives individuals a sense of certainty and reassurance, despite previously having had their individual identities dislodged and abstracted into mall shoppers. As a result, individuals are subtly persuaded to espouse the only identity that is truly reflected and fostered in a commercial center, that of consumer. Again, at a most invisible level-that of interior space-individuals consent to uphold an ideological set of values different from the ones they might have in another environment. The next level of consensual participation in the consumer ideology of the mall is the act of consumption itself, and this need not be at the physical level. Indeed, its most thorough influence is at the level of cultural images and personal and social beliefs.

In "Categories for Materialist Criticism," Terry Eagleton speaks on the nature of literary texts, but his observations might well apply to a mall-text like Riverside Square. He writes: "A dominant ideological formation is constituted by a […] coherent set of 'discourses' of values, representations and beliefs which, realized in certain material apparatuses and related to the structures of material production, so reflect the experiential relations of subjects to their conditions as to guarantee those misperceptions of the 'real' which contribute to the reproduction of the dominant social relations" (1147-1148). At Riverside Square, one of these discourses of values is reflected in the projection of idealized images of men and women. Another discourse of value lies in the way, whether deservedly or not, the products are sold for their worth as status symbols.

The manipulation of the individual's image is most evident in the wide array of photographs displayed behind store windows. In boutiques like Landau, bebe, Ann Taylor, to name a few, photographs capture the images of smiling, attractive women (slim, model-like, Caucasian) wearing desirable fashions. These fashions range from the designer business-look (right for the corporate office), to the designer casual-look (perfect for home or family life). The men and women are invariably in their late twenties to early forties (the age group with the most buying power). In their attire, their age, their physical traits and body language, the images of individuals on the ads are indeed upscale, just as the Riverside Square brochure promises. The matter, however, brings up the question of just what the effects of projecting such magazine-ad images on individuals might be? Their ostensible purpose is to entice the consumers into spending, and thereby to actualize their purpose for being at Riverside Square in the first place. But something else also takes place in this discourse. By being presented with idealized images of attractive, together, happy individuals, the consumers are first given a vision of what it is desirable to be. When they realize that they are not as the vision projects them to be, their natural reaction is to seek to be that. "Shoppers," states Nancy Backes, "play with the images, the semiotic signatures [. . .]. They invest their deepest longings, their most profound desires" in them (5). This is the spark that motivates consumers to try to satisfy those longings and desires stimulated by the idealized images. The shortest way to do that is by acquiring those products. Thus, on the back wall of the Movado boutique, black and white photo images of Pete Sampras and Wynton Marsalis can sell Movado watches without these celebrities even having to wear the product itself. Their celebrity image is enough to seduce. However, if, as Rob Shields claims, "consumption is an active production of self" (Buettner 1), the question remains: whose self does consumption actively produce? At Riverside Square, it is that self which the dominant social relations of consumerism and consumption want shoppers to aspire to be: unique, upper middle-class, stylish, upscale individuals with economic clout. The ultimate source of material with which this self was actively produced, though, lies not within the individual; rather, as Marx has pointed out, the source lies outside the individual, in the social, cultural and economic environment.

In addition to the idealized images of individuals, there is a similar duplicity in the effect produced by the articles of consumption-the commodities-themselves. At Riverside Square, these are already apportioned to the fashion conscious, upscale consumer. Someone in search of power tools, even computer hardware and software will not be satisfied at Riverside Square. As the slogan promises, everything is "anything but ordinary." The commodities, therefore, are distinctly on the side of the fashionable, not on the side of the functional. With department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale's on the premises, with boutiques that offer "the finest" in women's and men's and children's fashion, with beauty services, home furnishings and accessories, with jewelry and leather and luggage, with the New World Coffee shop that sells one rugalech for $1.25 and urges one to "bring home the world" by purchasing their product, Riverside Square definitely banks on shoppers who subscribe to what Marx deemed the fetish of the commodity.

A mysterious thing happens to a product of labor, Marx states in Das Kapital, when it becomes a commodity. Worth more than the materials or labor it took to produce it, a product acquires a whole set of values when it enters the social and cultural arena of exchange. It is there that it is imbued with a significance barely connected with the process that produced it. Indeed, a commodity has been invested with ideologically created values, so subtly introduced into the consciousness of the individual as to seem natural and commonsensical. A diamond, for example, is certainly worth what it goes for and certainly affords the owner the prestige and power it brings; yet, it remains a form of carbon. A pair of panties at Victoria's Secret, not even weighing one ounce of material, can sell for $35 at the height of the holiday season. So it is with the various other commodities sold and bought at Riverside: Godiva chocolates, Tiffany jewelry and glassware, etc. Some of these products might actually be well-crafted and may deserve the high status they receive, but others might not. Their sellers may merely want to associate themselves with high-status products, and secure locations in a mall that caters to that kind of consumer. Banana Republic, Gap, United Colors of Benetton, Brookstone, William Sonoma, Pottery Barn, to name a few, could just as well do business at less prestigious locations.

Terry Eagleton defines one aspect of ideology as being a medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world ("Ideology"). In the case of commodities, the sense is made with rather simple logic-things that cost more are worth more. To be upwardly mobile, therefore, is a good thing, because, success is measured by the worth of things one can afford. Owning expensive products proves one's worth over someone who possesses inexpensive ones. The power of ownership clearly feeds into the fetish of the commodity, and that is as the hegemony's class ideology wishes. Class ideology is an important agent in a hegemonic condition. Class itself has less to do with money than with behavior, image and values (Fussel 27). In society, class remains one of the distinct barriers that help maintain hegemonic control because it is a structure arranged in hierarchical order. It is difficult to transcend the class one is born into (Fussel 27-28); yet, class ideology itself insists on that transcendence as a way to measure an individual's success. As a result, the classes directly above one's own project a space one desires to enter, while the classes below are domains one wishes to avoid. The exploitation of this social drive in individuals is one of capitalist hegemony's main forms of control. At Riverside Square, class ideology decidedly exploits the image of what Paul Fussel has described as the upper-middle class (33-36). Appeals to consumers' sense of what is elite, elegant and sophisticated manifest themselves in various ways: the brass, ironwork and woodwork of the "galleries" is reminiscent of Victorian grandeur, the presence of Tiffany's lends a touch of the Romanovs, the performance series features classical musicians, Saks Fifth Avenue invokes that thoroughfare's heyday of high society, the inner courtyard (outside of Houston's Restaurant) offers a fountain in the form of a running stream. This image though is from a class to which the majority of Riverside Square shoppers do not belong (Fussel 34). It's underlying purpose is not to fulfill longings and desires, but to encourage them.

Although the upper middle class still works for a living-oil, shipping, medicine, law, real estate-it is, nonetheless, characterized by having large amounts of leisure and the wealth to afford to waste it in frivolous ways (Fussel 37). The upper-middle class's allure for the classes beneath it is that it is able to escape work as drudgery. Upper-middle class image is still accessible, though, to the classes immediately beneath it because they can still recognize themselves in it. The power attire for men displayed in Onore, Via Spiga and Structure, for example, is only one step above the attire found in Macy's or Gap. Yet, for all its attempts to affect an upper-middle class image, Riverside Square is still squarely middle class. One revealing sign of middle class values, according to Fussel, is the projection of the sexual image (32). True upper-middle, he claims, downplays sexuality and exhibits the greatest amount of role-reversal in relationships-where the men stay at home and the wives work. Various Riverside Square stores and fashion boutiques, like Bloomingdale's, bebe and Sunglass Hut openly project sexuality in their window displays and ads, albeit on a somewhat sophisticated level. A walk down level one, for example, where one finds Ann Taylor, Jay Crew, Elizabeth Landau is as fraught with sexual messages as the high fashion runway. For an unabashedly middle and lower class display of sexual imagery and energy worthy of a Las Vegas casino there is Victoria's Secret. It's location, next to Tiffany and Co. makes for a stark contrast of snob appeal and the risqué. But the point here is that, while Riverside Square and its attendant boutiques, shops and department stores try to capitalize on the effectiveness of ideological values (like upward mobility) to motivate consumers into consuming, the image is still a ploy, an illusion. The discourse between mall and shopper has only served to induce the individual to engage in a play of surfaces.

Nonetheless, the consumers who construct a sense of self through satisfying the fetish of the commodity may indeed gain a sense of worth in doing so. They may even appropriate the mall-text and transform it to suit their own desires and wishes. Yet, this sense of satisfaction is compromised. It comes by indulging in a process in which they gain a sense of self and worth that is fostered and justified by the very power that stands to gain the most from their having internalized something alien and fabricated and turned it into something familiar and natural. Living up to idealized power images (because power, according to the dominant ideology, is good) is the motivation behind competition, which, in turn, fuels a capitalist hierarchy of values. Read in this context, consumerism and consumption are justifiably open to criticism for exercising what Marx termed a "false consciousness" getting individuals to endorse potentially contradictory values and attitudes. The unfortunate result is that hegemony has the power to prevent alternative modes of social and political attitudes-that might improve society-from developing, or of making them seem impractical, unrealistic, not in tune with human nature.

As a site of consumption, Riverside Square (like most malls) may indeed have many meanings. It could serve as a place where individuals go to "construct" new selves, or as an outlet where they may satisfy deep longings and desires through the acquisition of products imbued with the power to assuage insecurities, or it might simply serve as a climate controlled version of Main Street perfect for strolling. Despite these, however, Riverside Square conceals a bigger design whose origin is found in the heart of a dominant, materialist system bent on creating the perception of need when, in fact, there is none. This illusion disenfranchises individuals as it appropriates them, injects an emptiness that can be filled by each new visit to the mall, each little act of consumption.

 
Works Cited
Backes, Nancy. "Reading the Shopping Mall City." Journal of Popular Culture 31.3 (Winter 1997): 12 pp. Online. EBSCO. 4 May 2002. Keyword: Malls.

Buettner, Saro. Rev. of "Lifestyle Shopping, the Subject of Consumption," by Rob Shields < http://www.stolaf.edu/people/farrelj/MALL/ESSAYS/Shields.html>.

Chandler, Daniel. "Marxist Media Theory." 27 April 2002.

Cuneo, Carl. "Hegemony in Gramsci's Original Prison Notebooks." 4 May 2002.

Eagleton, Terry. "Categories for a Materialist Criticism." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. 2nd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1998. 1142-53.

Foster, Kahla. Rev. of "Myth, Identity, and Social Interaction: Encountering Santa Claus at the Mall," by William Thompson and Joseph Hickey < http://www.stolaf.edu/ people/farrelj/MALL/ESSAYS/Thompson-Hickey.html>.

Fussel, Paul. Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. New York: Summit Books, 1983.

"Ideology." The Encyclopedia of Marxism. 2002 ed. Ed. Brian Fasgen and Andy Blunden. Marxist Internet Archive, 2002 .

Kovinski, William S. The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc. 1985.

Litowitz, Douglas. "Gramsci, Hegemony, And the Law." Brigham Young University Law Review. 2000.2 (2000) 26 pp. Online. EBSCO. 4 May 2002. Keywords: Marxist, Malls.

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Mauricio Rosales is pursuing an M.A. in English at William Paterson University.

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