If you think cultural critique is based on ideas or beliefs, and that cultural “threats” come in the form of messages and “values,” then you’ll have a cultural radar that is only equipped to pick up on ideas and beliefs. But the mall has never been guilty of being a think tank; one doesn’t usually think of the Gap or Walmart as sites of the culture war because they don’t traffic in ideas. As a result, the threat of these sites doesn’t register on worldview radar; because such worldview approaches remain largely fixated on the cognitive, something like the mall drops off the radar (while an
...more
