Westfield Revisited in the Mind.

Still trying to puzzle out why I was banned from taking photos of Westfields unless a member of the family or friends was in the photo ( as if that would make much different to Westfield being depicted in the background if a terrorist threat is detected. )

Notice that Westfield is not even on the logo outside termed The Westfields Shopping Centre. It's now just Westfield, a district of London like Southfields is in South London near Wimbledon but a new form of community entire of itself with its own "policy".

Westfield is a place where the same boring branded shops are offered but the idea, as Ballard put it in Kingdom Come, is to offer more of something akin to a religious experience, a collective affirimation of identity through compulsive shopping and spending rituals embraced freely.
All of this was as deeply weird. The place is weird. Not least considering I was told my presence was not welcome with the comforting knowledge that I could take photos only if a relative or friend was in it. But it was breaking the code by taking photos of the building itself.

Perhaps it was the wrong kind of emotional reaction to the place, one of ritual affirmation of the new "community" being At One in their shared pursuit of the same driven goal-consuming. A lingerer taking photos by definition is a) not spending and b) not being part of it: that is not consuming.

This shows a kind of intolerance of the outsider, a fear that in buying nothing I was rejecting the shared community values of compulsive obsessive consumerism as a lifestyle choice, without which the mystique of Westfield would break down.

For Westfield is more that a place to shop: it is a place of worship. And one shall not make any graven images of Westfield. I should have been consuming or, at least fully engaged with consumption. To take pictures for free is a kind of heresy.

It might have expressed disapproval instead of affirmation. Perhaps, as Ballard said, consumerism could lead to fascism. Here could be the future of a "happy face fascism" where only positive and selective versions of satisfied consumers was the emotionally correct response.

Such is Westfield's policy the security guard who told me robotically that taking photos was forbidden. As Westfield's policy. This privatisation of public shared space means a person is required voluntarily to do something he ought to feel compelled to do-and to call it a choice.

Taking photos without being part of Westfields means not sharing what Tony Blair, the ex-PM who looks like a daytime TV presenter or other oily permatanned creeps trying to incite the masses to feel good about tribalised identities through consumption or "our values".

These Temples of Consumption are there to eradicate history, the sense of past and future and create an eternal present in which nothing else matters but the entitlement one must expect as a human right: disappointment and satiety breeds the desire for more and more.

Thus it is never enough and breeds resentment. One that could lead to lead to "elective psychopathology" , the hatred of those who do not share "herd values" by the herd and those who know how to manipulate them

That is as a herd of the bewildered who are mesmerised into consumerism. J G Ballard actually based Kingdom Come on The Bentall Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames but his meditations on these places,

"I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard said in an in interview, 2006

What he also said of these bland generic Palaces of Consumerism applies to Westfield. In an interview for The Independent in September 2006 Ballard reflected,

"Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in....You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on. But they do not".

Literally, then, they buy into being conned. Ballard continued,

"Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much?.....because it's so... cretinous." They ( the consumers ) seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains. That's why it's a potentially fertile basis for some major psychological shift."

"Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?.... In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts.

Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism. It's a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter... The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation.".

The only reaction for and against these places Ballard has mused is psychopathology. Those who cannot take it any more will emerge of of the "desert" and let rip with their mail order Kalashnikovs simply in order to force what some contemptuously call "consumerbots" to feel something.

Those who participate in the boredom will need more and more and the latent drift towards a voyeuristic culture based on cruelty will be furthered by those who hunger for violence and outrage to quicken the adrenals: hence the way rough contact sports will play a bigger role as well as ritualist and choreographed street violence and hooliganism.

All four of Ballard's last four novels Super Cannes, Cocaine Nights, Millennium People and Kingdom Come deal with the notion that the world is overcrowded and increasingly homogenised and organised for perfect order and stability in which the architecture of malls, hotels, airports and business parks eradicate historical consciousness and plunge infantile consumers into a fairytale Neverland.

And yet with Ballard these"architectures of control" always lead with their residents and visitors to a lethal psychic entropy in the nervous system in which long periods of banal boredom will give way to "the new pathology of everyday life." and random acts of violence, rape, murder and meaningless terrorism.

In Central Europe I noticed in Bratislava and Krakow that not only rollerblading, smoking and dogs were banned but also photos and, more oddly, guns, as if people would ordinarily carry their guns around with them in Poland and Krakow. What on earth could have been the thinking behind that ?

The idea that consumers would walk through a mall with a gun is curious. Perhaps it is true that if life becomes so boring and deracinatred that people will seek to resort to meaningless acts of violence simply to make themselves and others feel more alive.

In Kingdom Come, the looming dominance of the shopping mall becomes an example of what Ballard termed "the architecture of control"

"The ideas offered by Dr Maxted I endorse, by and large.....In Kingdom Come the psychiatrist Maxted observes that: "Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness."

The fascination with Nazism in England, the reference to "New Hitlers" or "Little Hitlers" as petty bureaucrats frustrated with their own lives, has now merged with the resentful feeling people have as Britain becomes a shoddy half cock version of the USA, without the remaining charms of continental Europe.

That offers one reason for the way Blair was able to tap into the notion that Britain along with the USA could embark on military regime change in Iraq led by some odder figures on the fringe of "neoconservatism" and invoke all enemies as "new Hitler's" in what could be called the pyschology of projection.

Blair sought to tap into the man of messianic destiny pose in a very English way but the danger to British democracy is not only what Lord Hailsham warned long ago as the danger of an "elective dictatorship" but also in a fascist style type of eschatological politics being promoted by the PM's ministerial executive machine.

As Ballard wrote,

Bush and the neo-cons are driven by emotion, and this appeals to Blair. The emotions are the one language that he understands, and reality is defined by what he feels he ought to believe.

It if often forgotten that Hitler and Mussolini were experts at oratory and of of having political rallies devoted to kitschy choreography and parades and the systematic and perverted use of language to distort reality in the was that Blair did over Iraq with the soundbites and the spin.

Not having been dominated by a Nazi or Communist totalitarian regime and faced with inexorable decline from the status of a world power to satellite state of the USA has created a new hunger for Britain to reassert it's importance as compensation for being an offshore island of a European superstate which is supposedly meant to take Britain seriously as the major player

Yet, as Ballard commented,

Britain's per capita income is one of the lowest in western Europe. Without the largely foreign-owned City of London the whole country would be a suburb of Longbridge, retraining as an offshore call-centre servicing the Chinese super-economy.

In Kingdom Come Ballard wrote in the Guardian in 2008 that in in relation to Consumerism and Fascism, that

The underlying psychologies aren't all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you're looking down the parade, it's the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms.

When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence."

Consumerism has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters' groups, is not that far removed from fascism."

Then in the New Stateman Ballard continued A Fascist's Guide to the Premiership in September 2006 that,

The notion of being British has never been so devalued. Sport alone seems able to be the catalyst of significant social change. Could consumerism evolve into fascism?

Is the English working class re-tribalising itself? Out here, to the west of London, in the motorway towns near Heathrow, a few St George's flags still hang in a dispirited way from council house windows and the coat-hanger aerials of white vans. As I drive from Shepperton past the airport, there's a sense of a failed insurrection

During the World Cup, a forest of flags flew proudly from almost every shop, factory and car, a passionate display willing on more than Beckham's boys in Germany.

This wasn't patriotism so much as a waking sense of tribal identity, dormant for decades. The notion of being British has never been so devalued.

Sport alone seems able to be the catalyst of significant social change. Football crowds rocking stadiums and bellowing anthems are taking part in political rallies without realising it, as would-be fascist leaders will have noted.

The English, thank God, have always detested jackboots, searchlight parades and Führers ranting from balconies.

But the Premier League, at the pinnacle of our entertainment culture, is a huge engine of potential change, waiting to be switched on.Could consumerism evolve into fascism? There is nothing to stop some strange consumer trend becoming a new ideology.

Whilst resident in Poland I warned that Poles ought to be beware that England, where some million migrants thought of as a land of milk and honey is an increasingly dystopian version of the future and that veneration for England is entirely misplaced.

Yet the psychopathologies are already coming here with the gated communities of Salvator Tower in Bronowice and elsewhere in parts of Krakow. Be careful what you wish for. As Ballard ends on an almost apocalyptic note,

Real power has gone, migrating to the shopping malls and hypermarkets where we make the important decisions in our lives. Consumerism controls everything, and the ballot box defers to the cash counter.

The only escape from all this is probably out-and-out madness, and I expect the number of supermarket shootings and meaningless crimes to increase dramatically in the coming years.

If anywhere, the future seems to lie with competing systems of psychopathology.