Introduction

How can we write about spectacle and retail capital without essentializing them? Gibson-Graham (1996) asked the same for capitalism itself, drawing on feminist and queer theories, though also including Derridian hauntology, to deconstruct the self-certainty of such a phenomenon as ‘globalization’. Retail Ruins, similarly, attempts to look closely at these metaconcepts in a way that understands them as always in formation and never fixed, static, natural or guaranteed. The urban voids described in Chapter Two are meant to do just that: introduce us to this world and force a confrontation with its implications. By holding the focus on these ruinous sites, the text is meant to hold open a moment of inventive and spontaneous insight that gestures towards the many things this space could be and may already be. Hauntologically, the void holds open the door for de-commodification.

Edensor (2005a) finds something similar in industrial ruins. The difference with retail ruins is that those same tendencies and dynamics also unfold in what Edensor assumes is a structured and ordered totality. Maybe that is good news for us critics, being the prerequisite for something else to come, something we do not yet know. Goss (1999), despite the cleverness of his dialectical method, ends up obscuring the more radical potential of Benjaminian thinking on ruins and ruination, namely, the move towards a de-commodified and post-capitalist world. As Goss (1999) was critical of what he called a ‘failure in dialectical thinking’ among consumption-oriented research at the time, he exhibits a lack of deconstructive thinking, as his dialectics fall back on themselves and turn into their own ruins, neatly wrapped in the return-of-the-same in commodity culture, now dialectically inverted in imagination only. To put it bluntly, the risk is that we imagine ourselves as radical in everyday acts of consumption that are, in the end, not radical at all.

Others like Gibson-Graham (1996, 2006) keep the critical lens on capitalism, though in a multidimensional and expansive way. They simultaneously acknowledge other kinds of noncapitalist economic and social existence amid those ruins and ruinous processes. They also draw on Derrida, among others, to strike out on a more hopeful trajectory in the face of metacriticism. Capitalism, we will see, works by way of an intimate relationship with the void and the haunting it entails, through so many exorcisms, also known as ‘creative destruction’.