Shopping Malls as Infrastructures of Aspiration: Learning to Labor in Spaces of Leisure

This chapter investigates malls as ultramodern, pedagogical spaces where low-income, upwardly mobile business process outsourcing (BPO) agents acquire cultural competencies and soft skills required for success in the BPO industry. Malls are sensoria and infrastructures of aspiration that reconfigure agents’ biomediatized bodies by altering tastes and creating desires. Malls also foster virtual travel via spatiotemporal experiences of modernity. However, agents’ aspirations regarding global cosmopolitanism are frequently misaligned with the poor material conditions in which they live. The city’s informal settlements and economies must be understood as sharing a temporality of simultaneity with shopping malls and BPO tech parks rather than representing stages in a temporality of linear progress. This chapter diverges from theories that conceive of subject formation through the control of ideological state apparatuses or disciplinary technologies, and instead argues that, under contemporary capitalism, subject formation occurs through the circulation of commodity affect and desire across the socius.