Our project understands postwar US modernity in terms of its optimisation of different flows: of cars, goods, images and people. Drawing on recent sociological reappraisals of Spinoza, we explore how these new flows all served the conatus or the passionate “striving” of US citizens, generating a new social infrastructure configured around the universal pursuit of individual desire. Adapting a phrase Manuel Castells uses in another context, we view urban and suburban America after 1945 as a “space of flows,” a place where congestion of different kinds—traffic jams, supply failures, queues, delays—were framed no longer as mere problems but unacceptable obstructions to the natural surging of desire.

 

In this symposium, supported by the Raymond Williams Society and Leeds Humanities Research Institute, we ask whether such flows are now nearing their end. Supermarkets can now seem in crisis, eclipsed by their own online systems; some brand new megastores now stand empty, unopened and unused; and many of our shopping malls, even on Black Friday, remain quiet. Our project's interest in approaching postwar US modernity as a "space of flows" thus seems increasingly historical. Is connectivity now inhibiting movement? Are we entering a more total phase in the privatisation of experience? Will this intensify still further that decline of local communities many once blamed on "Americanising" supermarkets and malls? Or might it herald the rise of other kinds of communities--of other ways of being, both for ourselves and with others?  

 

This symposium addresses these and other important cultural questions through two distinct fora:

 

 

Academic Panel, 16:00-17:30

READING RAYMOND WILLIAMS IN THE POST-MALL WORLD

Our keyword flow performs an interesting double function in Raymond WIlliams's late work. The word he reached for to describe the uninterrupted TV programming cycles that he encountered in a California hotel room, flow also appears in Towards 2000's memorable description of the busy highways outside, evoking the "mobile privatisation" in which cars follow a clear and predetermined pattern of movement even as the drivers inside continue to feels they are serving their own needs and desires. The proximity of these uses in Williams's late writing suggests that flow, for him, connoted a new epistemology: a new paradigm, technological and philosophical, which reconfigured movement itself in the name of ease and individual autonomy. The supermarket trolley and the mall escalator not only epitomised this new paradigm but were mechanisms that allowed it to reign, ensuring that flows could keep flowing even after shopping threatened to weigh us down. But these machines are now fading from everyday life. As many now buy all larger items online, and as consumerism in general embeds itself  more firmly within our private homes, supermarket trolleys in particular might soon lose their present ubiquity. At this juncture, as flow fades into the near future's past, our panel returns to the originating work of Raymond Williams. Drawn from a variety of disciplines, our panellists ask how might Williams help us understand the imminent demise of a paradigm of flow he once apprehended in advance? How might mobile privatisation be understood in 2016? Are we entering an intensification of that loss of local communities on which many in Europe and elsewhere once blamed the "Americanizing" supermarket and mall? Or might we stand on the verge of new ways of being--both for ourselves, and with others?  

 

 

Public Reading, 18:00-19:30

EWAN MORRISON, Tales from the Mall.

Our symposium then culminates with a reading from one of the UK's leading novelists, Ewan Morrison, whose 2012 book Tales from the Mall brilliantly anticipates the looming demise of shopping flow that is the focus of our work. Through his own selected readings from the novel Morrison will evoke a near future in which the bedrock of the mall and the second wave of capitalism--with the family as model consumer--has broken down. Here a new model consumer emerges, flexible, precarious, self-reinventing: an idealised subject who has no need for fixed structures such as malls. From this perspective, Tales from the Mall suggests, we might even soon feel a new nostalgia for the family-orientated shopping centres of the past, no matter how artificial they have seemed. As such our disucssion will arc back to the work of Raymond Williams, confirming that his plural understandings of consumerist flow name what is fast becoming a historical phenomenon, outmoded by new social and economic structures that require new modes of cultural understanding.