Between consumption places and consumerism spatialities: Noo-political transformations of everyday life in/from the shopping center

Abstract

This text starting point is the question of the transformations in the daily lives of contemporary metropolis’ inhabitants, focusing on the massive construction of shopping centers that has been growing since the 1970s in Bogotá. The text analyses how the emergence of such places has shaped new sociability spaces where private relationships are translated to the public scene, and also how the infrastructure of the city has developed in the frame of the consumer society. Thus, to live in the city is no longer about going around traditional places, but about the demand and supply of new experiences related to the commodities and services that the market offers. The shopping center is then the place of the noo-politics par excellance, that is, a dispositif which fortifies and materializes a technology of control which operates through the interpellation to the desires and bodies of individuals, which tries to modify people’s daily life dynamics, overcodifying it and putting it at the service of consumer society.