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FRED G. SEE Prisoners of the Archive: "Shopping for Images" IN MEMORIAM JOE RIDDEL You were kind to be at such pains with me and — thanks for the view. WCW, "The Visit" Tin the middle of November two years ago I was driving back to Buffalo from the Catskills.1 The first thirty miles or so of the return trip west is a long grade up through the mountains. Half-way to the top I saw a huge semi laboring slowly on ahead of me in the far right lane, weighted right down on the springs. When I eased out behind it into the passing lane I noticed that it was heavily loaded with Christmas trees. Then as I accelerated and pulled even with that westering truck I looked across the wide median and saw a huge east-bound semi speeding down-hill toward me in the opposite lane. As it passed me and the west-bound truck I could see what it was carrying. It was heavily loaded with Christmas trees. It felt a deeply American moment, one that suggested the symbolic grid we live by: the need ofthe west was being supplied by the east while the need of the east was being supplied by the west. But I found myself puzzled. Was anything reciprocal really happening? Surely no principle of exchange was involved. I struggled to understand the event in terms of the law of supply and demand, or surplus and scarcity. No wonder I Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 1, Spring 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 26Fred G. See was confused, because late twentieth-century America is more the scene of illusion than of law. And it was this illusion, based on what we all think we know about our culture and our continent, which had persuaded me to assume that the exchange of trees was the kind of transaction signifying a real and fundamental balance between surplus and need. No: it was only a movement of signs. So those trees did not refer to mythic directions, much less to any traditional economic model. They were moving toward consumers, and that's that. There could be no western surplus if trees were being sent hence. There could be no eastern scarcity if trees were coming thence. There was in fact no question of surplus or scarcity. The Christmas trees were on their way toward the heart ofour culture, the scene of our commerce. At that central place—east, west, here, there, whatever— they would realize their function as commodities. It was a vision of our culture as mall, everywhere as the center of a consumer people, where "The fundamental, unconscious, and automatic choice ofthe consumer is to accept the life-style of a particular society (no longer is there a real choice: the theory of the autonomy and sovereignty of the consumer is thus refuted)" (Baudrillard, "Consumer Society" 37). Because some markets are created solely by supply, by signs not needs, and have nothing to do with reciprocity. Such a simulacrum is '"a universe of operational simulation,'" and like any such "totalizing structure" it will "often provide no outlets, or tend to collapse into a singularity from which nothing can escape" (Moulthrop 260). Or to put it another way, markets can be created by the very possibility of marketing. In this case the movement of goods represented not need and supply, or a social principle of reciprocal exchange, but simply market activity seducing a system—in this case a mythic system of signs. No need; no scarcity. The possibility of the market had obviated need and changed the basic social equation. "Markets for a particular item of exchange" (it could as well be Batman or Bart Simpson t-shirts or Harlequin romances or electronic games) "tend to give rise to superordinate markets trading upon the terms of trade themselves," as one recent writer notes (Collins in). That's what I was witnessing—the creation of a local market by a much larger one, the national market of seasonal gift-giving anticipated annually by a plan for hypothetical profit-taking. Superordinate markets are like virtual reality or hyper-reality, representations of...

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