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Window Shopping

University of California Press

The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.
WALTER BENJAMIN, "On the Concept of History"

As the century draws to a close, the cultural detritus of the last two decades may well be measured by the rhetorical debates about the social formation called "postmodernity," and the subjective position deemed the "postmodern condition."1 In a 1983 essay, Fredric Jameson, one of the key diagnosticians of postmodernity, catalogued some of its symptoms as:

the disappearance of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions.2 (emphasis added)

This "disappearance of history" and its corollary effect, a life in the "perpetual present," has emerged as one of the most profound depictions of "postmodern" subjectivity. Yet these charges strike a chord that resonates back to the middle of the last century. In 1859, Charles Baudelaire indicted photography as being a "cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history."3 Baudelaire was an early declaimer of the dangerous transformations of history and memory that the photographic image would produce. Despite photography's "loathing for history," Baudelaire also recognized it as a technique that could preserve "precious things whose form is dissolvingand which demand a place in the archives of our memory."4 In this double-edged reaction, Baudelaire prophetically noted the emergence of a new archive of memory which obscures the past in the guise of preserving it. For Baudelaire, the disappearance of history was a potential consequence of the photographic image.5

The debates about the "post" to "modernity" address these same reshufflings of history and memory and are infused with many of the same ambivalences about the cultural effects of these new configurations.6 Theorists continue to examine the qualitative transformations of time, space, and subjectivity in what has variously been called postindustrial society (Daniel Bell), multinational capitalism and consumer society (Jameson), the society of the spectacle (Guy Debord), the neocolonial (Gayatri Spivak).7

In this crucible of philosophic debate, where history and memory are endangered forms, cinematic and televisual apparatuses become readable not just as symptoms of a "postmodern condition," but as contributing causes. A diminished capacity to retain the past is, as I will argue, a loss that has figured as the price of the cinema's cultural gain. Cinema and television?mechanical and electronic extensions of photography's capacity to transform our access to history and memory?have produced increasingly detemporalized subjectivities. At the same time, the ubiquity of cinematic and televisual representations has fostered an increasingly derealized sense of "presence" and identity. Seen in this context, descriptions of a decentered, derealized, and detemporalized postmodern subject form a striking parallel to the subjective consequences of cinema and televisual spectatorship. Where, then, does the "postmodern condition" begin?

Rather than proclaiming a single distinct moment of rupture?when the modern ended and the postmodern began?I suggest a gradual and indistinct epistemological tear along the fabric of modernity, a change produced by the increasing cultural centrality of an integral feature of both cinematic and televisual apparatuses: a mobilized "virtual" gaze . The virtual gaze 8 is not a direct perception but a received perception mediated through representation.9 I introduce this compound term in order to describe a gaze that travels in an imaginary flbnerie through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen. The mobilized gaze has a history, which begins well before the cinema and is rooted in other cultural activities that involve walking and travel. The virtual gaze has a history rooted in all forms of visual representation (back to cave painting), but produced most dramatically by photography. The cinema developed as an apparatus that combined the "mobile" with the "virtual." Hence, cinematic spectatorship changed, in unprecedented ways, concepts of the present and the real .

As a device to organize a critical intervention into the theorization of the "postmodern," I borrow a conceit from social and textual accounts of the nineteenth century?that fundamental paradigm of the subject in modernity, the flbneur. Flbnerie will serve as an explanatory device to trace changes in representation and the aesthetic experience in the nineteenth century. As a social and textual construct for a mobilized visuality, flbnerie can be historically situated as an urban phenomenon linked to, in gradual but direct ways, the new aesthetic of reception found in "moviegoing." As I will argue, the imaginary flbnerie of cinema spectatorship offers a spatially mobilized visuality but also, importantly, a temporal mobility. This use of the historical model of the flbneur will also draw attention to the gendering of power and visuality in the configurations of modernity. It is here that we can find the origins of the flbneuse , the female counterpart to the male subject in modernity.

By introducing the terms mobilized and virtual , I hope to widen the historical focus in accounts of the emergence of the cinema, and to extend a consideration of cinematic spectatorship to other activities that supply an imaginary flbnerie. Hence, I will argue that to trace the cultural formations that endowed visuality with its ultimately dominant power, it will be necessary also to analyze the cultural contexts for these acts of looking: the social behaviors involved in the examination of goods on display (shopping) and the experience of "foreign" spaces (tourism). The cultural shifts resulting from the organization of the look in the service of consumption, and the gradual incorporation of the commodified experience into everyday life, has, I will argue, profoundly altered the subjective role of memory and history.

In the nineteenth century, machines that changed the measure of space and time (machines of mobility, including trains, steamships, bicycles, elevators, escalators, moving walkways, and, later, automobiles and airplanes) changed the relation between sight and bodily movement. A variety of architectural forms also emerged in the nineteenth century which facilitated and encouraged a pedestrian mobilized gaze?exhibition halls, winter-gardens, arcades, department stores, museums. The pedestrian in a glass enclosed winter-garden or exhibition hall enjoyed an endless summer;arcades protected against weather; museums brought artifacts of the past into a tourable present. As the technical advances of iron and glass architecture changed the temporal concept of the seasonal, institutional museology changed the relation to the past.10 And, just as machines of transport (from the railway to the trottoir roulant ) produced a new experience of distance and time, these architectural spaces were, in a sense, machines of timelessness, producing a derealized sense of the present...