In Margaret Morse's "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction," TV's capacity to reoganize space travels out of the home, where Spigel elaborates its anxieties, and into the metropolis that increasingly constructs the nonspaces cultivated by TV. Both are linked discursively and historically to suburbanization (though TV, it’s worth emphasizing, is not historically contingent upon it–if anything, perhaps the acculturation of TV, as with film’s recuperation of the shocks of modernity in Benjamin’s reading, serves to enable and accustom its viewer to the types of nonspace requisite for the suburban move.) The mall and the freeway, for Morse, emblematize a televisual nonspace now stretched beyond the confines of the living room.
Malls are now redoubled in their nonspace, precisely in their evacuation that reveals the emphatic negativity of the phrase. Especially striking to me are the ways in which this nonspace has been seized upon by precisely those media emblematic of the techno-economic upheavals responsible for malls’ evacuation. Mall imagery, often in its (post?)postmodern empty form, has found new life in online culture, both as part of vaporwave’s image-repertoire and, more recently, as a niche phenomenon on Instagram (and presumably TikTok) where sites of empty malls, saturated with an erstwhile Y2K nostalgia, proliferate on accounts such as @liminal.locations, @aesthetic80sdream, or @luxurydeptstore, whose bios point to “weirdcore” and “dreamcore” as emergent cultural formations describing the sets of images in terms of the affective dimensions they’re understood to invoke (certainly one thinks of Freud’s unheimlich, familiar but unfamiliar, conjuring a dread one can’t quite name). These accounts post depopulated, haunting images of nonspace—often, though not exclusively, malls—whose access is mediated by the digital nonspace of the phone or computer. (I have to assume that much of their user base is gen-z given their mass adoption of its characteristic online grammar (referring to everything as x-core) and, especially, for the ways in which the loss of these spaces as socially meaningful seems to predate them: they’re constructed as a past in a way that presumes a constitutive lack of access to them in the lived experience of those who post and engage with these images.)
Malls evoke a version of the hyperreal that has its roots in a utopic vision of atopic nonspace, prior to both the economic reorganizations of 2008 that exposed some of the rifts in neoliberalism’s rising tide and the more extreme digitization of economy and phenomenology that characterize the last 15 years. They call to mind Mark Fisher’s idea of lost futures, spaces designed in a moment of perceived possibility now haunted by the possibilities of consumer paradise they failed to occasion. These lost futures inhere in what he calls “the stain of place,” (Ghosts of My Life, 191) where “particularly intense moments of time,” such as that with which malls are now being associated, maintain a spectral presence via the spatial coordinates with which they’re associated. Morse articulates the cultural work (and political resonance) of the future in service of which malls were built:
“Rather than a site of "contamination," the mall is a place to shore up the boundaries of the self via commodities which beckon with the promise of perfection from beyond the glass or gleam of the threshold in brightly lit shops. These commodities with roles in retail drama have a somewhat dreamlike quality even in terms of their usevalue, for they are less often connected with labor or the small necessities of life (for example, needles and thread, nails and hammers, seed and fertilizer, and so forth) than linked to leisure and a designer lifestyle (note the category shift of pots and pans, now that cooking is linked to luxury living). Rather, the preferred commodities of retail drama are "lost objects," the very things a subject desires to complete or perfect his or her selfimage. And, rather than being unique, these objects are massproduced, the very ones to be seen advertised on television, in print, and on display beyond the glass.” (105-106 in my copy – Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, Indiana UP, 1998). Most haunting, and we should think again here of the unheimlich, is the fact that “rather than being unique, these objects are mass-produced, the very ones to be seen advertised on television, in print, and on display beyond the glass.” (106) These nonspaces where mass-produced bolsters of identity were once hocked now signify, in the absence of their economic and ideological role, the absence at the heart of this construction. They also recognize as constructed this once-separate space, however mythic, where one might separate oneself from the “out there” even if only by plunging into a nicely delineated hyperreal. In the digital regime, this hyperreal lacks the spatial coordinates of the mall; these images signify only their liminality, ascribing, however ruefully, a nostalgia to the time at which the hyperreal semi-successfully inhered in an architecturally and geographically isolable sphere, prior to its redoubling of television’s infection of the home via the permanently traveling screen of the digitally-enabled smartphone. Morse argues that “Nonspace is not only a literal "nonplace," it is also disengaged from the paramount orientation to reality—the here-and-now of face-to-face contact.” (107). The mall, in contrast to the cell phone, actually proffers a here-and-nowness as a physical site of social organization, however mediated and hyperreal; one threatened more directly by the digital social regime.
Morse is right to note that “In a quite literal, physical sense, freeways, malls, or television are not truly "places." That is, they cannot be localized within the geometrical grids that orient the American city and countryside.” (106) The mall retains, however, a spatial coherence where non-place-ness can reside, a spatial coherence no longer afforded under the economic and cultural move to the digital world. Similar products of digital culture – what I might group here under the umbrella “post-vaporwave” – take up the freeway, or at least the car traveling endlessly through an infinitely renewable and anonymous nonspace, in aesthetic terms that work similarly to construct a sort of anachronistic simultaneity of the 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s, again calling upon a lost aesthetic of utopian digital culture and economic possibility. Parenthetically, this aesthetic anachronism that anchors vaporwave seems to be already at play in the privatized modern home, as Morse recounts via Benjamin (also evidenced in Beatriz Colomina's article): “The process of distancing the worker from the workplace and the enclosure of domestic life in the home, separated from its social surroundings, allowed a compensatory realm of fantasy to flourish, a conglomeration of exotic remnants in which new and old are intermingled. This phantasmagoria of the interior broke with the immediate present in favor of a primal past and the dream of the epoch to come. However, the twentieth century phantasmagoria idealizes not the primal but the immediate past, and is an agent responsible for its decay. And the utopia or dystopia which these forms anticipate seems less a vision of a future earth transformed for good or ill than a hermetic way of life liberated from earth itself.” (109)
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