Excursus 1: Shopping Malls I. Some of us haunt shopping malls late into the evening after the stores have closed. We do so in part for the music. During the day, shopping mall music constitutes a normally unobtrusive backdrop for the hard labour of commerce and capital. But mall music is transformed fundamentally when commerce ends, along lines comparable to Rancière's ‘double heteronomy’. Shoppers having parted, mall music emerges from its unobtrusive backdrop, and this is its first heteronomy. Oh, how it reverberates in empty halls devoid of footfalls and chatter. It works its way into every mall corner, chasing us down to insist upon its legitimacy, worthy of attention. Its normal pleasantries become an insistent liturgy: can you not hear how soothing and attractive it is? But in being so insistently pleasant, it emphasises its customary dependence upon commerce. Who, after all, needs pleasantries, when the customary irritants of shopping are removed. Mall music thus reverberates in an emphatic solitude not as an autonomous and absolute thing but instead as lonely and incomplete, as if tinted or stained by commerce and by capital. Thus it serves in its lonely solitude to reveal, as its second heteronomy, how truly unpleasant mall shopping and the spectre of capital can be.