I'm not entirely sure why Walter
Benjamin failed to finish his Arcades Project. It may have been his
untimely death in the Pyrenees, but it could have well been the
nature of the thing. When you read the massive, uneven pile of notes
and quotations that forms the Harvard edition of this half-finished
(or quarter-finished, or nearly-finished, who knows) “Arcades
Project,” you question whether or not such a thing would even be
feasible, or whether, like a perpetual stew, it would always be
subject to revision and addition and deletion. He was reaching for
this vast, barely visible constellation of ideas, and he was
accumulating his inspirations and documentary evidence, never forcing
them together into a coherent message. Because Benjamin was, above
all else, an archivist of ideas, a natural collector.
The Arcades Project takes as its
primary character the flaneur, the wanderer of the grand arcades of
late 19th Century Paris, a world so remembered and so
glorified as la belle époque,
even as some of its most beloved figures, like Charles Baudelaire and
Gustave Courbet spent their artistic life exposing the underlying
contradictions of that world.
You could say that
the artistic descendants of the flaneurs are those devotees of the
endless labyrinth of the modern metropolis, whether renowned writers
like Iain Sinclair in London or Georges Perec in Paris, or in the
scattershot urbanist meditations of Rem Koolhaas, or among the
countless urban explorers who post their photos and descriptions of
abandoned subway stations and missile silos around the Internet. And
yet as much as I like this approach, the space they work in is not
the economic or spiritual inheritor of the arcades.
Becuase the arcades
were sites of bourgeois consumption. When we Americans think of
Parisian boulevards, we think of accordionists on the Champs-Élysées
or some such thing, or maybe Monet paintings. We forget that in
France, the term “théâtre de boulevard” refers to cheap,
easy-to-understand, middlebrow theater, the local equivalent of
Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. And when Benjamin was calling Paris the
capital of the 19th
Century, he was, as a good Marxist, calling Paris the capital of the
high-capitalist era. And so, au contraire, the modern arcades in
their economic and spiritual form is found in the suburban shopping
mall.
This
isn't entirely a coincidence. The modern incarnation of the American
shopping mall was pioneered by Victor Gruen, an Austrian socialist
who fled the fascist tide that swept his home nation. And he
deliberately wanted to create something akin to Mitteleuropa coziness
and hominess, something that had been so largely destroyed by the
Second World War, and which stood in marked contrast to the
auto-centric American consumer culture.
To
this end, he designed the Southdale Mall in the posh Minneapolis
suburb of Edina, with the hopes of turning it into the locus of a
planned community of apartments, schools, and parks. These were never
built, all that was left was a shopping center, surrounded by acres
of asphalt parking lot.
For
so long, I avoided malls, and I still, by and large, fucking hate
them. In my West Coast life, I was able to avoid them by and large,
avoid the recirculated air, and the mingling smell of Pretzelmaker,
Yankee Candle Company, and Bath and Body Works. This isn't anything
that countless other people haven't harped on for decades, and I feel
no further need to elaborate.
And
yet in Bangkok, the mall is the prima facie standard of commerce,
unavoidable. Part of this is unquestionably climactic – if you're
shopping for hours straight, you want to spend as little of that in
the tropical heat as possible. But it also has to do with the stage
at which Bangkok developed as a modern metropolis. The city passed
overnight from open-air markets to malls without passing through much
of a stage of grand department stores and shopping boulevards that
marked the development of European, American, and Japanese cities.
Likewise,
the malls of Bangkok continue to multiply, growing ever taller,
grander, even as their American counterparts wither and die as my
countrymen do more and more of their shopping from within their own
homes.
How
many malls are there in Bangkok? It's hard to say, because it's hard
to know what to classify as a “mall.” Everything turns into some
kind of shopping center. Cineplexes, big-box stores, they all have
countless small businesses, ranging from simple stalls to major
chains, springing up like mushrooms in the corridors. The result is
that a continuum from the old market days emerges, with little shops
selling banana leaf-wrapped desserts or a few racks of polyester
dresses tucked underneath escalators or between the Starbucks and the
KFC. In the dead malls of the city – closed-down branches of
department stores, for instance – the market vendors move in,
selling cheap Chinese bras out of bins, and fortune tellers set up
shop on formica tables.
Not
long after I moved to Bangkok, the whole vaporwave concept reached
peak relevance, and it seemed especially pertinent to the city in
which I found myself. A tangle of the artifacts of '90s irrational
exuberance, virtuality, unfamiliar graphemes, bright colors,
fluttering palm fronds, cheesy Greco-Roman and baroque motifs, and
the sense of immanent destruction lurking just outside the camera
frame. The image...
...matches eerily with reality:
These
have become my arcades, the places I wander in and out of.
I
move quickly eastward, barely leaving the air con. This is the
pathway I know, and on an afternoon, like John Cheever's swimmer, I
move from pool to pool. I start among Arab tourists and bootleg
mobile phone vendors, in a structure futuristic on the outside, but
tawdry on the inside, and move over to a photography gallery, catch
my breath, and then stroll through two recently renovated centers,
one with an interior all in white, one with an interior all in black.
From there, I cross the fountain plaza past the line of teenage girls
all taking identical selfies, past the revolving door and the doorman
dressed like an Austro-Hungarian admiral, past Gucci, Prada. Over a
concrete walkway choked with shoppers, and through the building
burned down in the 2010 riots. This is the junction. I could walk
north, into a thick, crowded market of Ugandan and Pakistani hawkers,
an impossible tangle of narrow corridors and knockoff goods and
tuk-tuks full of Chinese package tourists, but I keep walking east,
and the crowds suddenly dissipate, and I walk into a pristine white
cube. Empty hallways, distant, pulsing music. I pause for just a
second, before crossing another concrete skywalk, past an
incense-thick shrine with traditional dancers, into the curvilinear
shopping arcades of a pedigreed hotel, before moving east into
another largely empty, dying shopping center, with desultory
restaurants and bored-looking market vendors. Next is the only major
gap in the connected network of escalators and halls. Breathe in the
heat, the smell of diesel, before going into a vast and well-heeled
mall I've never fully understood, seeming to be in direct competition
with a nearby establishment with the same owners. From there, I cross
over a white breezeway over the valet-parked Ferraris into the final
major name, quickly stop to look at wire cutters in a multi-story
hardware and housewares shop, and end in a quiet, supposedly
“ecological” complex of bamboo floors, where, exhausted, I get a
cup of coffee.
This
is the end of the river. I stand underneath the expressway, at a
point where two of the city's major arteries connect, but as this one
minute segment is a one-way road, little traffic trundles past. Some
kids sit on the rails of the grassy, largely forgotten freight
railway that goes down to the port, and motorbikes gather at the end
of a long, sun-baked frontage road. A handful of ultra-luxury hotels
are being built to the west, and further east, another, less cohesive
tangle of interconnected passageways emerges, but this is the quiet
lacuna in the middle of a very big city, a momentary pause. Here,
nothing begins, only ends.
