Maol Donn/ Mall done by Drouth

Poem (1)

MAOL DONN/MALL DONE1 Piped Muzak and the Way of All Narrative By Johnny Rodger Urlar The Shopping Mall and the Theme Park are easy targets when it comes to criticising globalisation and the homogenisation of corporate culture. But is there still space for a subtle analysis of their putative roles? In his debut full-length fiction film Chain shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival, director Jem Cohen follows the lives of two young women with a pseudodocumentary style take on their most personal moments spent among malls and theme parks in the USA. New Yorker Cohen is perhaps most famous for his work in the music industry, and particularly his 1996 Roadmovie made with REM, but with this new, ostensibly quiet film, he leaves us with a lot to talk about. One of the protagonists is a teenage mall-bum, Amanda, who has run away from home, sleeps rough, and hangs out in the malls by day avoiding the security guards. The other, Tamiko, is a young Japanese corporate executive who has come to visit malls and theme parks in the US to make deals and take back ideas to her homeland. Her company is about to convert the oldest steel factory in Japan into an amusement park. The two women never meet, and it might seem on the face of it – one squatting in the abandoned homes in the blighted zones around the malls, and the other taking out suites in top mall-centre hotels – that they have little in common. But Cohen is careful right from the beginning to put us into a meditatively humanist mood. We see long, lingering shots of corporate office blocks and commercial buildings, theme parks and retail stores, and always the highway networks around them are busy with traffic. But each time we close up from there to focus on one individual – no matter who or what they are about, or how successful they are at it – we feel a real uneasiness and anxiety at the precariousness of human existence. In the opening scene a voice-over excerpted from a commentary on Foreign Exchange Trading speaks about Options trading while we view this corporate cityscape. The point is not lost on the viewer; it seems that everyone in the mall is buying into a promise of some possible future delight, satisfaction and happiness. But what are the chances?

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Aficionados of Rem Koolhaas might recognise something here of his unending world of Junk Space. In an interview while talking about the role of narrative, private space and architecture in the film, Cohen seemed prepared to go even further than Koolhaas. He points out the intimate connections between mainstream Hollywood, Shopping Malls, and Theme Parks in terms of generating both tension and resolutions and getting people from A to B through a series of excitements and releases. A video game manufacturer might for example prefer a certain ending to a blockbuster film so that it can be adapted for their own end of the moneymaking scheme. Equally, the character Tamiko visits a theme park in Edmonton, Canada, which is combined with the second largest Shopping Mall on the planet. ‘The corporate attitude about entertainment and places for entertainment is incredibly credited on creating narratives for people.’ says Cohen. ‘All of these things are really mapped out in this incredibly sort of coldblooded way. They design places and experiences based on focus groups which are really predetermined. Theme parks, malls and movies … it’s no accident that it’s often the same corporations doing all three. You will hear how while movies are being made there are meetings going on with the video-game people, and the amusement park ride people, who will actually be making suggestions like “well if this happened to Batman we could generate this kind of game or this kind of ride” …’ It might be easy however, given the format in Chain, of a very sparse narrative line with a psycho-political bent, to overdo the symbolism here. When some young kids are seen falling out of a model US spaceship in an amusement arcade, are we supposed to see a symbol of America’s abandonment of new frontiers and its concentration instead on building up junk within its own frontiers? That may well be, but Cohen is nonetheless a master of the telling juxtaposition. Much of the soundtrack to the views of globalised, homogeneous, corporate landscape consists in songs like The Lonesome Valley – a delicate and consciously regional style of singing. Yet does not the very regionality of such music have its roots in a wider world of church music, Negro spirituals, and Scottish and Irish folk music? A subtle montage of tensions and contradictions,

inconsequential narratives and dissonant voices are thus gradually built up across the face of a relentlessly bland, ubiquitous and too familiar architecture. But Jem Cohen is one operator who won’t indulge us in instant and gratifying release from such tension. He’ll leave that up to Hollywood. Can’t wait to see the video game, though!

Fig. 1 shows the route of the Panathenaic Procession traversing the Greek landscape (it has come from the grottos of Eleusis), entering Athens by the Dipylon Gate, passing diagonally across the agora (in the square marked by a broken line), then winding its way up the slope and through the Propylea to the Acropolis. Figs. 2, 3, 4 and 5 take a closer look at the route of the Panathenaic Way as it crosses the agora, and map out the changing and developing form of the city through the centuries.

Siubhal We have the shopping mall where the ancient Greeks had the agora. Why delay, as Spiro Kostoff put it, ‘the moment of our reckoning. We must be willing to accept the fact that the social world of cities that played itself out in the old town square is dying; we will not bring it back by designing imitations of the Piazza S. Marco or the Hauptmarkt of Nuremberg.’ Indeed one could go further, and argue that within this analogical framework, the famed agora of ancient Greek civilisation could only play host to a much narrower range of classical democratic life than the full, central, dynamic and integrated experience of modern-day consumerism possible in a mall. Following this line, we might say that for a like-with-like fuller exposition of both the everyday and ritualistic aspects, as are inextricably wrapped up in a tour of the shopping mall, we would have to compare it with a more polis-wide phenomenon, as for example, in the Panathenaic Procession. This procession took place every year (and in an especially rich manner every four years), passing from Eleusis across the land to the Dipylon Gate, through Athens, and up the slope of the Acropolis Hill to the culminating point at the statue of Athena. The procession, like the visit to the shopping mall, was not just a spectacle for the citizens, for they also took part, and again like the mall visit, it passed along a way which was both sacred (ie. linking some of the most sacred sites) and at the same time was the main street of Athens, containing the principal mercantile, industrial and political life on its central spine. It is said indeed, that the position and size of the Parthenon is only comprehensible when viewed in relation to the Panathenaic sequence.

Figure 2

Fig. 2 shows the Panathenaic Way crossing an agora which in 500 BC is still a somewhat amorphous market place with government buildings strung out along the bottom of the ridge to the west. Fig. 3 shows the agora in 420 BC after the Hephaisteion temple had been built atop the ridge to the west. Figure 3 The front of this temple dominates the view over the agora, while at the foot of the ridge are, starting from the north, the stoa of Zeus; then a row of steps leading up to the temple, which also serve as spectator seats for theatrical events staged in the agora; the semi-circular seats of the bouleterion built into the hillside; and the cylindrical tholos. The circle in the centre of the agora represents the space where the orchestra sat during performances. The south stoa which has been built along the bottom of the figure is the first major architectural work defining the space of the agora, and it faces the line of march of the Panathenaic Procession, powerfully punctuating the movement along it.

Figure 1

Fig. 4 shows the agora in the Hellenistic Period. The area at the foot of the ridge in front of the

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Hephaisteion is crowded by new building but there is still a view from there through to the agora. The south stoa has been rebuilt closer to the square, and the Stoa of Attalos has been built

total of our current achievement’ and that ‘its essence is continuity, the product of an encounter between the escalator and air conditioning, conceived in an incubator of sheetrock …’ then so is it no more outrageous to claim that the most influential architect of the 20th century may ultimately prove to have been neither Corbusier, nor Mies, nor Wright, nor certainly not any current English peer of the realm, but a Viennese Jew, who went in the USA under the name Victor Gruen.

Figure 4

perpendicular to it, along the east side, further defining and framing the civic space which is at the heart of Athens life. Fig 5 shows the space of the agora in the second century AD. We see here how the space has been modified as the pressures of the growing civic life pressed in upon it. A new Temple of Ares has been built right into Figure 5 the agora in front of the Hephaisteion and the Stoa of Zeus, and the huge, clumsy structure of the Odeion projects right out from the south Stoa into the central space. There are also a number of fountains, statues and a glut of smaller buildings cluttering the plan. Confusion has set in where once there was clarity, and from this time on the agora deteriorated until it was destroyed in 267 AD by the Herulians.

So why have so few people ever heard of Victor Gruen? It is strictly for the interest of the hardened pub quiz veteran that the man born Victor Grünbaum actually had a number of tenuous and spurious connections with the greats of the 20th century: he studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the same school that had turned down Adolf Hitler; as a Jewish architect under threat from the Nazi regime he fled Austria in 1938 in the same week as Sigmund Freud; and when he took a train to Princeton University in 1942 he arrived with a letter of recommendation from Albert Einstein in his pocket. But these close-shaves with reflected glory notwithstanding, Gruen’s true and somewhat anonymous appointment with destiny came in 1953 when he designed the first ever shopping mall as we know it, in Southdale just outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. Southdale may be relatively small as the genre goes, with 72 stores and two anchor department stores, and a relatively tiny project budget at $20M, but it is a truly historic building, as since Gruen completed it, it has been the model, or at least the proto-type for virtually every shopping centre in America, being a ‘fully enclosed, introverted, multitiered, double anchor tenant complex with a garden court under sunlight’.

Urlar ‘If Space Junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout.’ Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace Just as Rem Koolhaas believes ‘Junkspace is the sum

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Gruen, as it happened, was a socialist, who believed that retailing would save urban civilisation, and that by designing the mall as a re-enactment of the Viennese grand Ringstrasse on the broken down ramparts between the city and the suburbs, he could resuscitate the American city. He accordingly planned Southdale at the centre of a 463-acre development, with apartment blocks, schools, a medical centre, a park and a lake. It has been said that there was ‘Nothing suburban about the plan apart from its site.’ Alas for

Gruen and his socialistic vision with a vital commercial heart, this plan was never realised, and Southdale was surrounded by an all-too-recognisable asphalt desert of car parks. It’s tempting now, of course, to see Gruen, with his failed vision of an integrated community, as a tragi-comic figure. In the face of an aggressively commercial and suburban exploitation of his plans, he retreated to Vienna in 1967, and died there in 1980, just as projects for those stripped down versions of his original shopping mall, which we all know as divested of any integrated social and humanist aspects, were beginning to be introduced to his homeland. His nightmare had followed him home to his deathbed. But before we snigger at his naïvety, one ought to remember the monstrous ideology and social climate which had forced the then Victor Grünbaum to flee Continental Europe in 1938. Could he, or any of his fellow émigrés ever feel safe again? Freud, even in free England, most certainly did not. Perhaps once in America Gruen really believed that the only choice for Western civilisation was between a commercially revitalised urban realm or the huts of the concentration camps. For those in the path of Hitler and the mobilised forces of his vicious ideology, the lesson of history was clear after all: only a nation of shopkeepers could save, as once they already had saved, the world from a dangerous Continental philosophy.

Siubhal Gruen’s return to Europe, to the Old World, the world of both his and his people’s most recent and most longstanding and bloody sufferings, does whatsmore carry a certain ring of necessity to it. If he is hounded there by the spectre of his failed vision of redemption, then in some way, ironic to say the least, human dignity is restored by compromise and capitulation before an evil of an infinitely lesser order: more people surely now visit the Ringstrasse Gallerien mall with its 750 parking places, than attend mass rallies in Vienna’s Heroes Square. Besides, a narrative needs space to unfold: once the hero has moved out from their home how can we understand the significance, if any, of their entanglements unless first we follow their path towards them? Take the myth of Oedipus, not dissimilar to Gruen’s history in its tale of two cities or civilisations (Corinth/Thebes, America/Europe) of earnest political striving to find the honest way, and horrific bloodthirstiness – even if the cruelties in the myth are practised more on a personal or familial basis rather than a racial one. It is the roads that Oedipus steps out on, and his movement along them towards his destiny that are continually stressed in this myth. Firstly the path out from Corinth to abandon the unwanted baby Oedipus on the remote barren hillside; then the meeting with Laius at the crossroads when

Oedipus chooses that first unconscious and most ugly of paths; then the encounter with the Sphinx on a bare brown hill overlooking Thebes and the overcoming of its mysterious power by a calculation of man’s will to walk – four legs, two legs, three legs; and finally, after the revelation of his sins, the wandering away from his adopted city, blinded after having gouged his own eyes out, and led through the wider world by Antigone, at once his daughter and his sister. Of course the vast corpus of myths are far from being the only conception of space and direction that we inherited from the ancient Greeks. Nor, arguably, have they proved to be the most important of influential such inheritance from the Greeks. It could be maintained that our civilisation having had no knowledge whatsoever of the Greek Myths could still have attained its current height and stage of development as long as it had always access to the philosophical and intellectual traditions to be found in the likes of Plato’s Republic and Euclid’s Elements. The main man and his boy theory, as it were. It’s a plausible theory, but there’s no doubt it would make for a less interesting and entertaining civilisation. We’d have no Shakespeare, for example, and as for Beethoven and Picasso, well who knows … The whole thing might have collapsed through sheer boredom. But what, if any, connection does that other Greek culture, disinterested rational enquiry, and its pure logic and mathematics in the tradition of Thales, Pythagoras and Plato which gave us an abstracted conception of an infinite neutral universe starting from an innocent, insubstantial point, stretching to limitless line, and broadening out to empty plain, have to do with the bloody and cruel paths of Greek heroes? It has been fondly imagined that the Greeks of that earlier world of myths were more innocent, less morally developed and complicated, nearer in sum, to the dawning of civilisation. But this is demonstrably not the truth – anthropology and students of ancient history can point to civilisations much older and less developed, perhaps even less complicated than this one. Perhaps these later Greeks – Thales with his measuring tape, Plato with his slide rule – were only consolidating; a sort of municipal surveyors, mapping out, securing and valuing for human consciousness the space that their heroic ancestors had already conquered for them along the paths of mythical endeavour. It’s a model that has its attractions: having placed a tentative, suffering human foot on an unsteady world, the later Greeks now wanted to wash that foot free of blood and steady themselves, in a world that was more, well, platonic … Such a reading might be attractive to some historians – but not to Friedrich Nietzsche. For many people Nietzsche, more than any other thinker, constituted the embodiment of ‘dangerous Continental philosophy’, but he certainly had some firm ideas about the value of Greek history. In his eyes the decay of Greek culture would follow a similar historical trajectory to the deterioration of the Panathenaic Way. Who, Nietzsche asks in his Birth of Tragedy, has not had a dream of the nobility and sublimity of classical – that is pre-

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Socratic – Greece with its knife edge balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian principles? For Nietzsche the cluttering of the clear way across the Athenian agora would only be symptomatic of the failure of Greek will to walk that knife edge. For him ‘Plato against Homer: that is the whole, the genuine antagonism’. Homer’s heroes and characters and the classical drama of Aeschylus are glorifiers of life and human will, whereas the later Plato (427-347 BC) for him was a bitter, unhealthy control freak. In the face of these bearded mathematicians of old, Nietzsche gets the wings of his own moustaches in a flap, and even goes as far as implicitly – if not specifically – denying the real existence in nature of the number two: ‘Logic rests on presuppositions with which nothing in the actual world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are equivalent things, that a thing is identical at different points of time … It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.’ So much for moustaches! – and this in the book titled Human All Too Human. Numbers for Nietzsche, so it seems, should be of use only, as for the mythical hero Oedipus when he encountered the Sphinx, in solving great problems of the human will, and moving onwards in the heroic path of adventure and suffering. And only by accepting the universe as it is, and as it moves, rather than translating it into an abstract and neutral system of conventional signs, as does the geometer, can man continue to evolve. It is interesting on this head, to stress that the Panathenaic Way moved across the land from Eleusis beyond the city gates – where the Eleusian Mysteries were performed; secret rites and sacrifices to the goddess of the field and harvest to ensure the fertility of the land – and on up to the Acropolis to the statue of Athena – the goddess of wisdom and the arts and the protectress of the city. This path could thus be said to enact the very dialogue – between dark instinctual and ecstatic forces of the earth, and the heaven-sent light of sobriety, wisdom and form – which Nietzsche characterised in The Birth of Tragedy as being the essence of the marriage of

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the Apollonian with the Dionysian spirit. Indeed in Aeschylus’s (525-426 BC) only remaining trilogy The Oresteia, the dramatic culmination is reached when both actors and the audience left the theatre together, and followed the Panathenaic Way up to the Acropolis to perform the final scene there. Again, at the end of The Oresteia, Aeschylus is intent on showing how justice and democracy were founded as a compromise between the Furies’ desire for vengeance, and the Gods’ (and specifically the city goddess Athena’s) desire for right. At any rate, this justice as the enactment of compromise is a very different one from the pure, eternal, immovable justice which is the ostensible theme of Plato’s ‘Republic’. And it is the very sedentary aspect of Socrates and Plato and their followers that Nietzsche despises. He sees them as forgetting the body, forgetting movement, forgetting physical health, in favour of an abstract intellectual vision. Those later Greeks – Socrates, Plato and so on – camp down on the agora and try to imagine this dynamic world away into a more perfect, eternally static one. Nietzsche considers this a capitulation to the mean trading standards of a decadent market place, one that clutters any worthwhile path, and hampers the movement necessary for a healthy civilisation.

Urlar Who can blame Plato and Socrates for not being bothered with the hike up to the Acropolis? The path down into the horror or the adventure is , when all is said and done, always privileged over the return or the way back up. Think here of Aeneas and his machinations to gain entry at Avernum – yet who remembers how he rose back out of the Underworld?: consider whether, even if Dante had only ever completed his downwardly spiralling ‘Inferno’ it would not still have been one of the greatest poems ever written: Orpheus mustered all the strength and wit of his lyrical power to move down towards his love in Hades, but then lost it all on the way back up: and perhaps most desperately honest of all is Milton’s antihero Lucifer – he doesn’t even want to come back up, but to drag everybody else down after him. And for the modern hero things are even worse: there is no path back out, only Inferno, the nether path, the low road, and it keeps on falling. There is no Puragatorio, nor Paradiso; for as with the predicament of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark, it’s just down, down, down … And so it is also with the shopping mall. Why, after all, when it comes to paths and ways, should we expect the narrative of ‘tension and release’, as Jem Cohen puts it, to be any different in the ethics of the suburban shopping adventure from that of the late medieval literary epic?

Equally, in his strategic placing of entrances and escalators around his malls A. Alfred Taubman makes Koolhaas with his would-be revelations about Junk-space sound like a pompous dilettante, some kind of Dutch Hansi-come-lately. The ring roads rise as they travel around Taubman’s malls so that at least half of the entrances are at upper level. ‘They go down much easier than they go up’ Taubman explains of the mall-goers ‘We put 15% more parking on the upper floor than on the first (ground) floor, because people flow like water.’ It’s hardly a Miltonesque simile, but it will do as an explanation, its dubious imagery entirely adequate to the flavour of its environment, and besides who would argue with Taubman when it comes to the American shopping mall. If Victor Gruen created the bleeding heart archetype, then Taubman , no émigré lefty, put a hard American head on it by concentrating the highest all-American average sales of $500 per square foot in malls of his design. Taubman sneers at the very notion of an urban or downtown version of the shopping experience. Downtown department stores are four or five floors high, you enter on the ground –‘and shoppers are like water, remember, they flow downhill. So what happens – It’s going to be hard to generate traffic on the upper floors.’ It would evidently be easy on the other hand – you wouldn’t need the critical eye of a Rem Koolhaas – to assert that the mall-builders are a pretty repetitive bunch. If you have a simple idea, as they say … And Taubman’s ideas seem to fall into a bottomless abyss of simpleness – they are, that is to say, even simpler in their simpleness than their deceptively ostensible simplicity would allow you to believe. Yet in that simplicity … There is, for instance, his take on the building up of tension and allowing for its release on the path around the mall. Although ‘tension’ and ‘release’ are not the sort of words he would use: ‘People assume we enclose the space because of air conditioning and the weather and that’s important. But the main reason is that it allows us to open up the stores to the customers.’ For ‘stores’ read bolgia and Dante’s Lucifero could hardly have been more eloquent about the design of his own ‘Inferno Experience Inc’. The phenomenon of the mall, and its growth, has however, created – on a world-wide scale – such

intermall rivalry and competition that their efforts to create excitement and adventure have become ever more complex, yet at the same time, they know they have to remain simple at heart. In Santa Monica Place, for example, an artist was hired to build a 200-ton sand castle. The largest mall and theme park combo in the world in Edmonton, Canada – which is visited by Tamiko, the Japanese character in Jem Cohen’s film – boasts (if that is the right word) a reproduction of a Parisian street, and of New Orleans’s Bourbon Street, a golf course, an indoor ocean pool with a rubber beach and water slides, a reproduction galleon floating in a tropical lagoon with live fish, and four submarines. Perhaps the best worldwide example however comes from the mall in Stoke-on-Trent, named, of course, The Potteries Centre. It features the largest teapot in the world, made, of course, from fibreglass.

Siubhal The route of the Panathenaic Way, as mentioned above, was not only a sacred path, but also an everyday main street, passing through and linking the areas of principle mercantile, industrial and political life in Athens. It’s not every street that gets to operate with such charm, importance, and symbolically picturesque aspects, as well as providing the perhaps more mundane function as a channel for movement between different points across the city. But then neither should we take the merely ‘functional’ aspects of the street for granted, as though they were an obvious and ‘natural’ aspect of urban living. There was indeed a time before streets existed in urban design. ‘The street is an invention.’ Says urban historian Spiro Kostoff: ‘At present it is possible to locate the first conscious street in history at Khirokitia (Cyprus), dating from the 6th Millennium BC. This spine of communication, running uphill from the riverbank and down on the opposite side of the hill, was built of limestone and raised considerably above ground level, with stone ramps leading down at regular intervals among the houses on either side. The primacy of Khirokitia may be challenged in future scholarship. But that the institution of the street developed somewhere, wholesale, or in part, is not to be doubted. It is surely wrong to take the street for granted.’ An example of a pre-existing city can be seen in Çatal Hüyük, widely believed to be the oldest example of urban civilisation uncovered by archaeologists. Dating from 7th-6th Millennium BC, and excavated in modern day Anatolia by James Mellaart, Çatal Hüyük is an intricately assembled Neolithic complex of terraced

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housing and shrines without streets. All the pedestrian movement was made over the roofs although social interaction may also have taken place in the open courtyards. One most interesting point about this streetless city however, is that it belonged to a matriarchal and gynocentric society which Mellaart asserts built it around the worship of the Great Goddess. As such it existed before the invasion of waves of warlike patriarchal – or as Marija Gimbutas called them, andocratic – IndoEuropeans spread from the east, and across Europe, conquering all in their path. This contrast, and indeed clash of civilisations – the gynocentric and the andocratic – is also a key factor, according to Robert Graves, in understanding the formation of the narratives of the Greek Myths as we know them. Essentially, as he sees it, the Myths as extant are misreadings , or rather readings towards their own ends, by Indo-European invaders, of matrilineal rites which they saw depicted in tombs, temples and on artefacts of the civilisation they conquered on their sweep westwards. In his Greek Myths Graves says: ‘A study of Greek Mythology should begin with a consideration of what political and religious systems existed in Europe before the arrival of the Aryan invaders from the distant North and East. The whole of Neolithic Europe, to judge from surviving artefacts and myths, had a remarkably homogenous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many-titled Mothergoddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya.’ He goes on to say: ‘Achaean invasions of the thirteenth century BC seriously weakened the matrilineal tradition …’

European warrior andocrats as they swept westwards. With respect to the urban values of community and shelter, the phallus as an urban or spatial model may appear to offer few advantages over the womb other than its pure directionality. But whither does the standing penis point? Is it really – as far as the quality of civilisation is concerned, ever upwards? Certainly not for Gimbutas, who saw the pre-existing gynocentric age as one characterised by peace, cohesiveness, and artistic and creative endeavour. Yet an hypothesis that the street – like the narratives of the Greek myths as we know them – was an invention of patriarchal society, of the invading IndoEuropean hordes may have – shockingly macho though it is to say so – its attractions. Did, that is to say, the invading hordes, like Haussman’s wreckers in Paris, smash right through the jumble of ancient cities in their path? Did they, like Jason and his bunch of merry men, break open a way to rush directly at the heart of the matriarchal labyrinth and get their hands on the Mother’s golden fleece? At any rate the ‘patriarchal invention hypothesis’ does not constitute the first time that the street has been associated with violent assaults – in offence or defence – of a city. Just as Taubman demands clear sightlines in the streets of his malls so that customers can, for example, see first-floor shopfronts from the ground floor, so Haussman’s wide boulevards, which he smashed through old Paris, were said to be so broad and straight specifically to prevent protesting lefties barricading, and also so that canon could be fired down upon them more easily. It’s of note whatsmore, that the word boulevard – being originally used to describe those wide streets in Paris which were formed along the paths of the demolished old city defensive walls – is, by way of that very history, cognate with the word bulwark.

and: ‘Early Greek Mythology is concerned , above all else, with the changing relations between the queen and her lovers, which begin with their yearly, or twice yearly sacrifices; and end, at the time when the Iliad was composed and kings boasted: “We are far better than our fathers!”, with her eclipse by an unlimited male monarchy.’ It seems easy enough to make an analogy between the putatively respective symbols of the gynocentric and the andocratic – the womb and the phallus – and the huddled streetless form of a city of Mother Goddess worshippers, and the path of the Indo-

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If only it really were all so easy though, and the obvious analogy – say here the street with the narrative – were always the right one, encapsulating in perfect form, a truth, or at least a tendency. Alas for this macho hypothesis – which would have civilisation as we know it, the western way, beginning with a raid, a narrative and a path into danger, and ending complacent, seated, calculating and hording its spatial gains – the extant historical and archaeological evidence simply won’t fit. In the first place the date and place that Kostoff tentatively gave for the invention of the street – 7th-6th Millennium BC in Cyprus – is at least 2,000 years before the waves of aggressive infiltration of patriarchal tribes of semi-nomadic IndoEuropean pastoralists came pressing in on South East

Europe from the Russian steppe. Of course Khirokitia with its street may just be a one-off, an arbitrary anachronism, but nonetheless in her study of pre-IndoEuropean Europe, Marija Gimbutas does assert that in many of those settlements excavated the houses are ‘organised into streets’. But nor do the inconsistencies in such a hypothesis end there, for to suppose that there is some sort of equivalence of significance between gynocratic society and the symbol of the womb on the one hand, and patriarchal society and the phallus on the other, is to completely misunderstand the most fundamental beliefs, practices and modes of communion of these respective societies. As believers in an immanent Mother Goddess, the original – what Gimbutas calls ‘Old European’ – societies employed as symbols and models both the womb and the phallus in their rituals and worship, and Gimbutas records that there have been at least 30 000 finds of figurines, sculptures or clay, wooden, bone and copper models of these types of symbolic forms. With the case of Indo-European raiders however, they brought with them the belief – viciously prudish, some might say – in a transcendental pantheon of gods, removed from any sort of earthily symbolic fuck-worship into their ethereal mansions of pure meaning in the heavens above. The dead-Derrida, who may or may not have already joined that pantheon in the sky, might indeed have called these johnny-come-latelies, just a bunch of Indo-Euro-LogoCentrists. But why be put off from our melody? If we have our own tune should we not just play it to the best of our ability? March around the castle and wake everyone up with it in the morning? And so what if it’s nothing tried and tested, nothing classical? If you can’t get up to some Ceol Mor then go downmarket, play it as a fiddle tune instead and dance it round, as they say, below the gallows tree. Take ‘The Hen’s March O’er the Midden …’ Something will always come up. Like the ancient excavated city a bit closer to home for example – Skara Brae in Orkney, dated 3500-2500 BC. It has low roofed passageways communicating between the units, which are built into a midden in a jumble somewhat reminiscent of Çatal Hüyük. It might be impractical given the Orkney weather to scramble about the roofs looking for your relatives or indeed a Mother Goddess shrine. But nonetheless these passageways are low, long and dark, and are certainly felt as penetrations through the dunghill into the fairly ample living spaces. On the other hand, as the main covered-over street or passage leads to a small paved open court, the

settlement may be said to satisfy most requirements of the above definition as ‘a fully-enclosed, introverted, double-anchor tenant complex with a garden court under sunlight’, and thus be categorised as the ancientest model of a classic American shopping mall.

Urlar Phallic Symbols? – three in a bed It’s fairly common phenomenon to be proved wrong in the long run. Whether one ever actually gets to fall dazed before a Damascene revelation, or is struck down by the sword of Nemesis is another matter. The alternative is, of course, like the hens up to their knees in their own shit, to keep marching o’er the midden. So which way did Gruen go? Was he still strutting over the dunghill of his ambitions till he died in Vienna (at least and at last it was his own dunghill) in 1980? It’s easy for us to say that he was ridiculous, blind and pigheaded in his belief that he could save urban civilisation through retail. That as a foreign intellectual and leftist, he failed to have any real insight into the American people and the American way. That the American people did not, in point of historical fact, want to be saved from suburbanisation. It seems whatsmore, a straightforward observation on ‘the way things are’ to point out that retail outlets and the mall actually became the servants and facilitators of the further, apparently endless, suburbanisation of the North American continent. The inexorable trend towards suburbanisation in American life seems so strong, so integral and essential that we wonder how in the 1940s and 50s Gruen even as a foreigner could have failed to notice it. Right from the very beginning of American political development, a certain anti-urban ethos is evident. Jefferson, for example, in his dream of a white man’s agrarian republic, held cities to be ‘sores on the body politic’. Then by the 1940s LA was already so far suburbanised and spread – a victim of boosterism – out into the desert that it would have been impossible to reverse the trend. But even if Gruen was unaware of West Coast developments, or if he actually rejected their relevance as a model (surely a foolish thing to do, but a stance adopted by many notable eastern Jewish

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intellectuals), he ought to have been aware of the march of suburbanisation (and the odious often racist regulations, like covenanting, which were invariably the subtext of their anti-urban institution). Olmsted, for example, had described the NYC grid as ‘the epitome of the evil of commercialisation’, and had designed his first planned picturesque suburb of individual family houses with gardens at Riverside, Illinois, as far back as 1869. But is it really a question of something that is essential to the American people? Is it enough to explain Gruen’s spectacular failure to revitalise the urban realm by recourse to formulae of the type ‘People just want …’? We may remember that throughout history at different periods and in different places some people have been happy with apartment living, and others with individual houses set in their own land or territory. So why did the American people ‘want’ at this time to suburbanise? And what can we mean when we use the word ‘want’ here?

The form of any city – suburban or urban – is a receptacle of meaning. As Spiro Kostoff says: ‘The more we know about cultures, about the structure of society in various periods of history and parts of the world, the better we are able to read their urban environment.’ And of more specific interest, as regards the case in hand here, he also says: ‘We “read” form correctly only to the extent that we are familiar with the precise cultural conditions that generated it.’ When we begin to research the conditions of suburbanisation and the growth in the number of shopping malls in America however, we meet at first with some results that are most unexpected. The historian Hanchett points out – to our surprise – that the growth of malls seems to follow no demographic logic at all. The example of the town of Cortland NY is cited – between 1950 and 70 there was no growth in population whatsoever, yet six new shopping plazas were opened. We may also cite the fact that in 1953 there was one mall in the whole of the USA (Gruen’s Southdale, of course), yet by 1956 there were 25.

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What happened during those three years, which seemed to be a watershed for the American way of life? Had the American people made a spontaneous and momentous election for the suburban way, or had there been some new legislation to promote decentralisation perhaps? There are, undoubtedly, people who would have sympathy with Gruen and his vision; who would see it as a catastrophe that he failed to revitalise the urban realm and would figure the mall as the beginning of the end for civilisation. These critics of the suburban age might be surprised to find that they would have Nietzsche for a bedfellow. For the truth is that the explanation for this explosion in mall building in the 1950s, and the consequences of it (not only in terms of the building up of vast retail empires, McDonalds, Gap, Burger King, etc.; and in the replacing, in many cases of downtown streets with landscaped pedestrian malls) with which we live today is ultimately to be found in mathematical calculation and a strictly logical behaviour. But there are odder – and hairier – bedfellows to come, for the mathematics and logic at stake here, operate within the horizon of capitalist economics – so roll over, bedfellows, Karl Marx has just jumped in. We have already remarked upon the irony of the opening scene in Jem Cohen’s film where a voiceover excerpted from a commentary on Options trading hints at the possibilities for future increase, wealth and expansion. It’s not to say that the irony there exists only on a blatant or merely patronising level with respect to the shoppers, but there is nonetheless a further level of irony that persists at a deeper more weighty level of significance and, one might say, at the expense of Cohen’s trope. The historical fact is that the sudden momentous growth in mall building from the 1950s is premised not directly on a mathematical principle of increase, and possible future expansion, but specifically on one of depreciation and collapse. In 1954 to stimulate investment in manufacturing the US Congress changed its tax rules to ‘accelerate’ the depreciation process for new construction. This meant that a business with a new building can calculate its capital assets (ie. the building) will deteriorate quicker than they did before. This depreciation is set off against the taxable income, supposedly so that the business can pay for the replacement of its capital investment. If, say, a business has a building worth $20M and it is allowed to depreciate its worth over 10 years, then it can set $2M each year off against its taxable earnings – so in effect it makes $2M of its profits tax free. If this depreciation is then ‘accelerated’ so that the business is now allowed to depreciate its capital assets over five years, then it now has $4M each year to set off against its taxable income.

The result was, as Hanchett says, a ‘bonanza’ for developers – but also for their shareholders who enjoyed huge payouts of untaxed profits – with a spate of building, and always more and bigger malls. We see then that the urban form – or the suburban tendency – of much of the western world, is in large part to be explained by the vagaries of the American tax system. Roll over hairy bedfellows, barefaced Niall Ferguson has just jumped in!

Siubhal The worldwide expansion of the phenomenon of the shopping mall, the body of corporate know-how that it brings with it, and the subsequent ease with which the model is applied to cover over and claim our civic spaces has had and is having enormous consequences in our daily lives as citizens. Mass private property does not only – as in former feudal times – involve land and a few buildings of little worth, but extensive urban and suburban capital assets which are laid open to invite the public in. In a new town like East Kilbride, just outside Glasgow, for example, the covered-over town centre, formerly operated by a public body, East Kilbride Development Corporation, is now owned by a private English company. Local neighbourhood squares in East Kilbride, with their local shops and pubs are now also owned by private companies. It has got so that, just like Oedipus’s story – although perhaps even more sinister than his case – more and more of our public life is taking place in private spaces. How does this mass private ownership of spaces used for public life affect the individual citizen’s civil liberties? The law has had some difficulty answering this riddle. And that’s why I think that the video game to be marketed to accompany the narrative of this article should be titled ‘The Black Oedipus’. Like most video games the action here will take place both in real time and space and in an unreal, fantasy or virtual world. Nothing could be more concrete, quite literally, than the real world which is it stake here. Swansgate Shopping Centre in Wellingborough, England, is a brutalist 1970s construction comprising a covered square and four pedestrian malls. It was built by the ‘stopping up’ of several highways of ancient origin in central Wellingborough, hosts around 100,000 visits from shoppers per week, and was licensed on its lease terms to allow ‘full pedestrian access to the common parts of the demise premises from 7am to 11pm daily’. On the other hand, the unreal, indefinite and

insubstantial element, which seems to wither and deform under any scrutiny here, is represented in this game by the virtually labyrinthine workings of the English Judicial system. The main character in the game here, ‘Black Oedipus’, is of course, a metonymic protagonist. By this we mean that, as with all other politically motivated operators of legendary status – take Robin Hood for example, D’Artagnan and the three Musketeers, Finn MacCool, Che Guevara and Santa Claus – the name represents a collective, or at least the deeds attributed to this one legendary name have actually been carried out by various characters operating within a similar field at roughly the same time. Again, like the Greek Oedipus, the 10 youths of AfroCaribbean background or ethnicity who constitute Black Oedipus all have some connection or other with another community far away – in this case, over the ocean – but as with Oedipus in Thebes, they belong here. Black Oedipus has 20 legs. But even that is no good for him. Black Oedipus was dragged before a tribunal of white men. What had he done? All 10 of him? The charges were various (CIN Properties v Rawlinson) and evidently serious, ranging from ‘whistling in public’ to being ‘frequently guilty of nuisance’. CIN Properties, the name of the company which is leaseholder for the Swansgate Shopping Centre – perhaps they should now be known by their quick phonetic game-name SIN – is determined to keep these youths off their concrete, and entirely in the care of the virtually labyrinthine judicial system. When the court case falls apart after police testimony, contradicted by video surveillance evidence, proves to be even too virtual for the indefinite realm of the court system, SIN decides it is cannot leave the boys alone. SIN hunts Black Oedipus down to his home address and delivers an epistle banning him from the centre. SIN then applies to the court for a legal injunction to back a privately enforced ban on entry to their shopping centre. An

Englishman’s home is, of course, his castle. So runs the quasi-legalistic adage. But Black Oedipus, cleared by a court of the land of any wrong doing, has been

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locked out of the castle at the centre of his home. The game is on. Black Oedipus’s very way of life is at stake. If the Swansgate Shopping Centre is shut to him, how is he to purchase his victuals and his vestments? If the banks and post offices are in the aforesaid centre how can he arrange his financial and occupational affairs? If the main source of employment is in the retail outlets of the centre, how can Black Oedipus even qualify for state benefits if he can’t declare himself – as locked out – available for work, nor cash his cheque were he ever to get one? It seems that the game, for Black Oedipus – who has, of course, been compared to a monkey by the security white knights of Swansgate – is to get back into the centre. For without entry to the centre Black Oedipus has no home whereof he can call himself a citizen. As the opposing player, the game for SIN is entirely different. SIN, like all malevolent beings since time immemorial, wants to ensure that common law and the courts can assure him – on invoking the threat of indefinite incarceration – the right to exile a citizen permanently from the centre of his home town, thereby (and to SIN’s indifference) endangering Black Oedipus’s livelihood and impairing his freedom to engage in the social and commercial relationship of his choice. HA! HA! HA! cried SIN. For in 1995 after many turns in the labyrinth, on final appeal, SIN proves the courts and the whole virtual realm of this game is on his side, by winning the legal right to keep Black Oedipus – the innocent Black Oedipus – out. Black Oedipus lies prostate – and chequeless – whistling a lament and weeping on his crazy paving in the suburbs. Oh woe is me!’ he blubs. ‘Is not the right of freedom to assembly one of the foundations of democratic society?’ He rolls onto his back, kicks his 20 legs in the air. He thinks he knows the rules of this game , and can prove SIN and the robber barons of the virtual realm have been cheating. ‘What’ he cries, waving his copy of ‘rules of the game’ in the air, ‘about the European Convention of Human Rights Protocol 4, Article No.2?’ But HA! HA! HA! cry SIN and the robber barons of the court in unison. For the UK, unique amongst signatories, has not ratified this article which guarantees the right to liberty of movement within the territory of a state. SIN and the robber barons of the English Judicial system close down the private portcullis to the castle of Swansgate Shopping Centre, and jeer at the folks below their high walls with that ancient legal principle which has become their battle cry: ‘Power to absolute and arbitrary exclusion!’ they cry. But all is not completely lost, Black Oedipus hears in his penniless, powerless suffering a murmur of changes in the wind. There is a stirring of the American Cavalry of the US court system. That other

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virtual realm – in the good old USA – is not completely stuffed with robber barons (not yet anyway, George), and does not believe the law of civil trespass should be used to curtail civil liberty. Individual voices come to Black Oedipus at first, ‘Property that is privately owned is not always held for private use’ he hears, and ‘When a property owner opens his property to public use a degree of privacy is necessarily surrendered’. The number of voices grow – they are sweet whistlings to Black Oedipus’s ears from across the ocean. ‘Quasi-public space is private space affected with public interest’ he hears, and ‘We know of no private property that more resembles public’. Finally Black Oedipus hears up through the crazy paving the drumming of a full gallop from yonder continent. The US Cavalry is coming, and like the three musketeers and their ‘All for one and one for all!’, the US doctrine has cohered as a battle cry – ‘Reasonable Access!’ the good barons cry. It seems the robber barons of the Olde English Court will in time be unable to resist this American doctrine and its force for good, and the game will go to Black Oedipus, but can he hold out that long as a no-citizen? And what of Scotland, and this game, you might ask – is it compatible this side of the border? Scots law and political culture remain as silent and mysterious as the Sphinx on this question. So how would a Black Oedipus deal with it? Its legal system is distinct from the civil jurisdictions of the Anglo-Saxon countries, but we are told it will probably just follow England’s lead (?) anyway. For the law in Scotland, again like the Sphinx, is a syncretic monster – it supposedly stands on its own four legs, yet it’s not so much an ass as a biddable dug. Footnote 1. In the Gaelic terminology of Ceol Mor, the classical music of the bagpipe, Urlar is the theme (lit. the ground, or floor) and Siubhal the development (lit. the going or the walking). MacCrimmon’s lament Maol Donn (lit. A Brown Hill, pron. Mall Done) is one of the finest compositions in the genre.