Consuming Megalopolis

Jon Thompson

Department of English
North Carolina State University

 

Celeste Olalquiaga. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

 

Even while proclaiming an interest in the vast and gaudy landscape of kitsch rejected by high culture, a good deal of postmodern criticism remains highly theoretical, committed to analyzing written texts and content to refer to the world of mass culture rather than actually study it. One of the strengths of Celeste Olalquiaga’s Megalopolis is that it investigates a wide variety of contemporary practices, many of them invisible to less perceptive eyes, seeing them all as social texts that say much about contemporary existence. Megalopolis is written in a clear, often lyrical style that finds its inspiration in the weird but compelling landscape of postmodernity, a landscape of telephone sex advertisements, malls, docudramas, SF movies Blade Runner and RoboCop, but also low-budget 50’s and 60’s futuristic fantasies), AT&T advertisement campaigns, comic books, cyborgs, World Fairs, Latin American or Latino home altars, snuff films, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, Brazilian carnival parades and the Chilean punk subculture.

 

Given her thesis that we are living in the ruins of modernity, and that identity and history, as traditionally understood, have virtually ceased to exist, Olalquiaga ranges across this “culturescape” of fear and loathing and desire with considerable authority and aplomb. Yet her argument is not primarily negative. Against those who have argued that postmodernity is a kind of endlessly recurring capitalistic nightmare, she sees other possibilities. Central to her argument is the practice of consumption. To Olalquiaga, consumption has been a misunderstood activity, wrongly associated with passivity, unfreedom and tyranny, making the human subject an object worked upon by the imperatives of capitalism. It is this notion of consumption that Olalquiaga wants to rehabilitate:

 

Avoiding a rationale for consumption based on functionality (that is on possible use), postmodernism sponsors consumption as an autonomous practice. . . . The purpose of this book is to describe how such an apparently finite project as postmodernism, understood as the glorification of consumption, does in fact enable the articulation of novel and contradictory experiences."(xvii)

 

Running through her analyses of contemporary practices, whether they are Latino home altars or low-budget SF movies, is this pivotal point: in a world dominated by the corporate message that commodities make the man, consumption can be an ironic activity, even an ironic mode of self-consciousness. If done right, consumption can involve a recognition of commodity fetishism itself, and thus a recognition of the entire way in which capitalism as a system attempts to co-opt and control subjects.

 

This argument is extended across five brief, but suggestive, chapters. Chapter one, “Reach Out and Touch Someone,” examines the fate of the body in postmodern societies. Despite the cult of the body in the West, Olalquiaga contends that what we are witnessing is not its triumphant deification, but instead its demise, what she calls “the vanishing body.” State-of-the-art projective technology (videos, TV, computers, etc.), postmodern architecture, hi-tech prosthetics, the ongoing fascination with cyborgs, AIDS, and of course electronic sex: for Olalquiaga, all of these developments point to the inescapable condition of “psychasthenia,” or the inability of an organism to locate the boundaries of its own body. The fragmentation and disappearance of the body means that increasingly, identity is not dependent upon organic being.

 

This case is further developed in Chapter two, “Lost in Space,” in which Olalquiaga argues that the technology of instant communication precipitates the loss of temporal continuity: “The postmodern confusion of time and space, in which temporal continuity collapses into extension and spatial dimension is lost to duplication, transforms urban culture into a gigantic hologram capable of producing any image within an apparent void” (19). Quite literally, then, the body is lost in space. One symptom of this near disembodiment is the space age iconography of the 50s and 60s, and its recent “reincarnation” in retro fashion. Whereas once this space-age iconography expressed some hope in regards to technology and its effects, the postmodern version is ironic at best. Retro fashion now is “a parodic attempt to breach some contemporary fears, most notably the replacement of the organic and human by the technological” (34).

 

In Chapter three, “Holy Kitschen: Collecting Religious Junk from the Street,” Olalquiaga turns her gaze to religious kitsch, particularly the religious kitsch that has been recycled by artists. This raw material is not merely faddish, but is instead used to fashion artistic artifacts that sacralize the secular and replace a transcendental emphasis with a political one (for example, the sanctification of contemporary femininity). For Olalquiaga, this “colonization of religious imagery” (53) does not involve a domestication of either its ethnicity or its politics. Rather, “the absorbed invades the appropriating system and begins to constitute and transform it” (53). Thus “Holy Kitschen” symbolizes the transformative possibilities of all marginal elements absorbed into appropriated systems.

 

Chapter four, “Nature Morte,” performs an autopsy, as it were, upon the postmodern fascination with melancholy, corpses, ruins, decay. Examining a variety of artistic practices (photography, dioramas, multimedia exhibits, fiction, atrocity art, postmodern junk art, and fake science exhibits), Olalquiaga explores the ways in which the bizarre and the grotesque allow for the recovery of a sense of death that is lost to our culture. Yet this melancholic aspect of postmodernism is not elegiac: “More than a lamentation for what is lost, this melancholic sensibility is deeply embedded in the intensity of the loss–not seeking to reconstitute what is gone, but to rejoice in its impossibility” (58). As a self-conscious form of naturalism, this nature morte aesthetic recognizes deadliness as the only coherent expression of postmodern experience, and thus exposes the reifying effects of “deadly discourses” (69), that is, the discourses or systems that pretend to an objective status.

 

If postmodernity has become a kind of giant, grotesque mortuary, as Olalquiaga suggests in Chapter four, this vision receives considerable qualification in her fifth Chapter, “Tupincopolis: The City of Retrofuturistic Indians.” The primary object of analysis here is “Tupincopolis,” a Brazilian carnival parade exhibit of an imaginary retrofuturistic Indian metropolis, a cross between the exoticism and flamboyance of Indian primitivism and the postmodernism associated with the world of Japanese high-technology. What interests Olalquiaga is the way in which the composition of elements within the parade works to humorously carnivalize both postmodernism and primitivism. The parade thus comes to represent the “third world’s” creative re-accentuation of “first world” ideology, particularly its mythical identification with technology-as-progress and its persistent mythologizing of Latin Americans as primitive. Tupincopolis, then, provides a paradigm for cultural change in the postmodern age. Rejecting models of cultural change that emphasize imposition, Olalquiaga maintains that cultural change is not “a matter of simple vertical imposition or ransacking, but is rather an intricate horizontal movement of exchange” (76).

 

In one sense, Megalopolis can be read as a sustained meditation on the failure of modernity and the cultural mutations that are filling its void within postmodernity. Olalquiaga elaborates this position by developing a number of related themes throughout the book. Like Baudrillard, Olalquiaga privileges the notion of simulation. Where modernity depended upon the notion of contexts, of objects and events seen and understood within specific and recognizable environments, postmodernism collapses the boundaries between reality and representation. “Intertextuality” replaces “indexicality”: “Simulation here will be understood as the establishment of intertextuality instead of indexicality. In other words, rather than pointing to first-degree references (objects, events) simulation looks at representations of them (images, texts) for verisimilitude” (6). Within postmodernity, subjects live their lives at a second remove: things tend to be lived through representation rather than directly. Experience comes to us now as highly encoded, increasingly available only through electronic representation; yet this vicariousness is experienced as real.

 

Megalopolis describes a world in which an image culture shatters the verbal culture of modernity, reconstituting “language” and power hierarchies. Artificiality and extreme emotion fill in, or more accurately, become substitutes for the relentless allusiveness and emptiness of this decontextulized, thoroughly intertextual world. In a world deprived of affect, the postmodern sensibility “continually searches for intense thrills and for the acute emotionality attributed to other times and peoples” (40). Images, icons, styles, and subcultures are endlessly recycled. For Olalquiaga, postmodernism becomes personified as a sort of thief. Like its production-less economies which reassemble rather than produce, it filches, pilfers, and steals. Postmodern culture is thus vicarious, voyeuristic, cannibalistic, and at times, “melancholic” (to the extent that it is doomed to merely repeat the styles and icons associated with a modernist culture). Space age retro, for example, “provides the melancholic parody” (34) of the cold efficiency of a high-tech existence. While one may wonder if “melancholic parody” is an oxymoron or is, as she suggests, a necessary way of coping with cultural fears and anxieties, Olalquiaga wants to make another point: to her, the endless circulation of simulations suggests that cultural imagery is endlessly adaptable to new contexts and desires–and this ability is to be celebrated rather than simply mourned as a sign of the loss of cultural specificity. And it is this emphasis on self-conscious, knowing celebration that defines for Olalquiaga postmodernity’s finest achievement as it continues on in the ruins of modernity.

 

In the final analysis, it is difficult not to agree with Olalquiaga’s micro readings, many of which are brilliant in their sheer interpretive power. Disagreeing is doubly difficult inasmuch as from the very first page she explicitly allies herself with, and celebrates, illusions, inconsistency, and contradictions as inescapable facts of postmodern life. Yet it seems to me that Olalquiaga’s theoretical argument is vitiated by its hyperbolic rhetoric. (“If the fragmentation of contemporary identity is reproduced in referential absence and the pleasures of pain are induced by a pornographic technology, it should come as no surprise that the body has been rendered totally vulnerable” [10].) All too often a particular truth is generalized into the universal condition: bodies are already cyborgs, cities are the wastelands of modernity (what of the cities that are not romantically ruinous?), the nature morte aesthetic describes the deadliness and decadence of postmodern existence (at least in the U.S. and Europe) in which subjects are compliant bodies, “not seeking to reconstitute what is gone” (58), embracing the impossibility of physical or cultural integrity, happily adrift in the detritus of obsolescent technology. Olalquiaga’s argument for a creative consumerism is suggestive, but in its unqualified form it comes perilously close to suggesting that shopping can be redemptive, that shopping is itself a kind of postmodern heaven. To this reader anyway, the notion of creative consumption as a way of life or end seems limiting, since no matter how the commodity is revalued, the socio-economic system that delimits the horizons of so many remains in place (not to mention the fact that many people simply cannot afford the acts of creative consumption Olalquiaga valorizes). After carnival, the disenfranchised go back to whatever lives they led before carnival.

 

In its widest extension, this point may be elucidated by examining the title of the book. Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities. The blurb on the back of the paperback edition glosses megalopolis as “the biggest of cities, but also a city in ruins”; yet the subtitle, “Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities,” points to a broader base of experience, one unrestricted by urban experience. Olalquiaga’s argument is comprised of a good many claims which undergo this same slippage–claims which have their basis in the urban experience but quickly become indicative of contemporary existence, everywhere. Time and again, her rhetoric transforms insights true of many North American and European cities, and their cultures, into general statements about the human condition at large. Because of their seemingly universal scope, these statements can command, at best, qualified assent. “Between a future in ruins and a past that is but a costume for another personification,” writes Olalquiaga, “contemporary culture is stuck in an allegorical present, unable to return nostalgically to the past or advance hopefully into the future” (35). Is all of contemporary society really stuck in this cultural time-warp? And is Brazil’s “good” postmodernism (its carnivalization of hi-tech postmodernism) the only truly viable alternative? Is our world really one megalopolis? Is the entire world really enmeshed in, critically or otherwise, Olalquiaga’s postmodernist illusions? To my mind, Olalquiaga uncovers the questions crucial to any serious analysis of contemporary culture, but she doesn’t always answer them.

 

Despite these limitations, few books can compare with Megalopolis‘s trenchant, lucid, and sensitive readings of Western urban cultures, and the practices and structures of feeling that constitute them. Like the best science fiction, a form repeatedly invoked by Olalquiaga, Megalopolis changes the way you think about contemporary urban culture.