Beyond the Plesir Principle: An Autoethnography of Mall-Lovin'

What are malls for? In the case of cities in developing Global South countries such as Surabaya, the answer seems well-established: malls provide a medium for capital accumulation and investment, creating a space for the rise of a middle class and the emergence of new consumptive practices. In this account, malls provide a welter of consumerist pleasures that in turn screens off the processes of inequality and dispossession that otherwise found them. This association between shopping malls and middle-classness, however, is what I hope to complicate in this presentation. More specifically, this presentation seeks to do so by examining a relatively recent phenomenon in Surabaya: the tenancy of churches in malls, most recently exemplified by Gereja Mawar Sharon’s move into the megacomplex Pakuwon Mall. While this phenomenon at first seems easily interpretable as a symptom of the further commodification of everything (in this case, spirituality) under late capitalism, this presentation proposes a different and less cynical explanation. Drawing on personal interviews and autoethnography (as someone who grew up and still partially lives in Surabaya), combined with psychoanalytic theories of love, this presentation reads the church-in-mall phenomenon as the desire for a public space that is nevertheless absent. This absence is thus not a sociological one that can be simply filled with exclusionary or inclusionary discursive practices. Instead, inspired by the psychoanalytic thesis that love means giving what one does not have, this presentation argues that the public is absent in malls the way God is absent in churches—as an excess.