Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities

by Celeste Olalquiaga

Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities [Feb 01, 1992] Olalquiaga, Celeste …

Genres: Nonfiction

112 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Malcolm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Re-reading a book claiming to explore contemporary culture 20 years after it was first published is often a risky decision, in part because one of the assumptions of so much of what we see in cultural and social analysis is that the era of postmodernity is one of rapid change. Surely, then, after two decades we cannot expect a claim to contemporaneousness to hold. It is to Olalquiaga’s great credit that much of the big picture she paints remains applicable to the current contemporary.

There are several vital strands that run through this short, rich and in places dense book – loss of boundary is one of the most important, along with anxiety (a common theme of early 1990s cultural analysis that retains its validity, even as it has become conflated with fear). The essential element of her case, though, is its urbanity; contemporary cultural mores are shaped by being of the city, and her vision is of a contemporary life being lived in one big ruined city (to paraphrase the publisher’s blurb). Crucially, then, she paints a picture of cultural systemic collapse where we are historically decontextulaised, where natural settings become human-made and there is a permanent tension between permanence and transience.

It is, in one sense, a grim vision. People suffer a general sense of psychasthenia – a loss of spatial boundaries – and widespread obsessive compulsive disorder resulting from (and contributing to) the predominance of simulation, the widespread presence of simulacra or signs and the absence of referent. So far, so postmodern; but Olalquiaga explicitly (and to my mind correctly) rejects Lyotard and Baudrillard’s view that the referent has gone to be replaced only by simulacra, by signs, in constant interaction. That is, she retains a sense of the real amid what seems to be the hyper-real. For Olalquiaga this ‘real’ is both historically grounded and her insight critical sharp – contrasting the coldness of a high tech digital world with the warmth of space age parody, with insight made more impressive by the relatively early condition of the digital from which she writes; this is barely ‘Web 1.0’ let alone the Web 2.0 world that so excites our current contemporary commentary.

Redemption from this grim vision comes from two sources – one culturally unexpected, one politically savvy. Olalquiaga is a theorist and analyst of the kitsch (see her excellent 1998 book The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience) and in this essay outlines three tiers of kitsch. In first degree kitsch, objects remain raw and with a sense of the hand-made, an honest ’lack of sophistication’ (p 43) where there is a direct, explicit hierarchical relationship between the real and its representation. There a sense of authenticity about these kitsch artefacts. In second degree kitsch, however, there is no hierarchical relationship between representation and referent – that is, the only possible referent for these mass produced kitsch souvenirs are themselves. There is, in these, no authenticity or usefulness, no use value only exchange or transaction where these artefacts are intentionally tacky. For Olalquiaga, the potential for redemption lies in what she sees as third degree kitsch where those objects and artefacts that risk existence as first degree kitsch become consciously recycled as ‘hybrid products’ (p 47) and in doing so become disalienating (not her word) cultural commentaries. The examples that she draws on here include Chicana/o and Nuyorican reinscriptions and reappropriations of religious iconography. She concentrates on the use of altares, personal or household sites of memory and homage drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the kitsch as banal, nostalgic sites allowing resurrection in an argument that, for me, resonates with what I know of Chicano/a cultural practices, including work I saw in a number of settings and galleries in Austin (TX) during a recent visit. This work on the kitsch remains, I think, one of Olalquiaga’s major contributions.

The other source of redemption is more expected. It is the way that in many the ‘Latinisation’ of the US steps beyond the view of Latin cultures as exotic or as part of the melting pot of mosaic or alloyed cultures to be used politically as parody. In this case she draws on examples from Brazil, the deployment of urban ruin as performance in carnival and a participatory exhibition of everyday urban existence in Sao Paulo in 1987 which she contrasts with the controlled regulated space of a similarly themed exhibition at the Whitney in New York in 1989. The second set of examples are less ‘artistic’ – these are the political activist ‘Superbarrio’ in Mexico, who reappropriates US superhero imagery to activism, and the style-without substance use of punk fashion among middle class Chileans as an example of the ultimate co-optation by fashion industries of punk iconography.

This therefore remains an important text drawing out the political and cultural significance of postmodern critiques of the modern era – she notes (on p 35) that “incapable of doing history, modernity could only be a ruin”: this image of the ruin, of a cultural and social condition of teetering on the brink of collapse remains powerful. Olalquiaga’s work becomes more significant as cultural commentary in the current condition where the insubstantiality of finance capitalism has been exposed, as we continue to pay the price for the very real material actions of the powerful, and as we try to make sense of the new world of the collapsed New World Order. Her continued insistence on the ‘real’ and on the seeming ‘margins’ of a Latinising America means that much of her work, 20 years later, is a cultural parallel of other more obviously political debates in the early 2010s.

[PMP · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honours thesis makes good.