Arcades Project

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 19^th 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 19^th 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.