Nietzsche at the Mall: Deconstructing the Consumer

"So perhaps we can put down our copy of Nietzsche that we've been contemplating to see that the mall, no matter how powerful and encompassing, may itself be transformed, its consumer gods dethroned, by the deconstructive power of laughter."<br />
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The concept of self, especially of the Cartesian cogito, has received a great deal of critical attention from postmodern and neostructuralist theorists. The rational ego is posited as the subject of knowledge in modern science and technology, animating the utopian projects of industrial civilization, and culminating in great urban conglomerates, in theme parks like Epcot Center, as in the sealed universe of commodities which constitutes the omnipresent mall. The selves which in the modernist tradition have become the subjects of knowledge and scientific power were, in the Christian tradition supplanted by modernism, the eternal souls that provided an invariant substratum for the fluctuating experience of human emotion and sense perception, providing a spiritual continuity in the quest for salvation: the stable vehicle bound for the static endpoint (eschaton) of history. That eschaton provided the template on which the modern idea of technological utopia has been modelled, from Bacon through Disney. The Magic Kingdom is, after all, a rarefied and idyllic image of suburbia with synthetic manifestations of American fantasy, from fake presidents to the eternally childlike persona of Peter Pan, both thinly disguised forms of the national self-image of incorruptible innocence. It's as if America wanted to go to heaven so badly that it created its own version of it, with prices accessible to most everyone, improving on Christianity by insuring salvation to anyone for a nominal fee. The mall, a pervasive expression of the same sensibility, provides an environment where the self, transformed from pilgrim or scientist to consumer, can achieve happiness, the realization of dreams, by the purchase of commodities. Thus the original quest for salvation has been transformed into one for consumption without end through the mechanisms of the science, technology and capitalist economy created by the modern cogito: "I consume therefore I am." But has the freedom which was originally to be achieved through salvation from sin, and later to be won by the twin revolutions of modernity — the industrial and the political — really been provided by the culture industry of consumer choice? The notion of freedom is based on the concept of the will: it is a characteristic of the will, which is supposedly capable of uncoerced volition. If a consumer "chooses" to buy a product, is she or he then expressing her or his free will? The advertisers would have us believe it, and many of us have been convinced, at least implicitly accepting the idea that shopping is the good life and inscribing the desiring subject of consumerism into ourselves by our daily practice of mall strolling