Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 34
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Popular Culture Review
the eighties they have become a sign of untouchable
know ingness, paralleling the multinational
headquarters and bank buildings of Southern
California and its imitators. There, the mirror-glass
skin of the building throws back all inquiries to the
inquirer, suggesting that today’s corporation is to be
appreciated precisely for its claim to high-tech
universality, that the m aterial claim is not
important—all that matters is the shiny sac of pure
capital, the ultimate postmodern abstraction (139).
Melville summed up his reading of 19th century American urban
existence in a searing crystallization: Bartleby’s silent, despairing
stare at the man-made walls of New York City. In our time that
metaphysical despair has metamorphosed into a desperate desire to
"write" on that w all—i.e., to fill the void of "untouchable
knowingness" with ourselves, or to internalize the Other: the two
impulses are really one and the same. In Gitlin's view, we have
attempted to meet the Other, and the Other appears to be us:
"Surface is all," he concludes. " . . . What you see is what you ge t.. . .
[Americans' love of reflecting surfaces] suggest[s] that the highest
destiny of our time is to become cleansed of depth and specificity
altogether" (139).
Jean Baudrillard makes an interesting distinction between what
he calls the "mirror" and the "video" phases of postmodern culture.
The "mirror phase," or what I would call "low postmodernism"
because of its roots in more conventional varieties of societal
narcissism, reaches its zenith in the cult of relevance beginning around
1965 and extending through the so-called "me decade" of the 1970s.
The self-serving get-rich narcissism of the Reagan/Yuppie years is an
extension of this type of low postmodernism. The "video phase," on
the other hand, reflects a tendency toward radical or "high"
postmodernism: a desire for "cleansing of depth." The attraction for
giant video screens, for example, which reproduce surrounding
environments either "live" or in instant replay, is one expression of
the way technology re-channels the essential human need to
authenticate being. Many people have experienced a unique thrill
from being on television, or from seeing themselves or someone they
know on television. Why is this experience, unique to the postmodern