Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, and Critical Theory at the University of Western Ontario
You’ll take me for a ride, I feel, and this is how I think you will:
SHOPPING SPREE AT THE MALL
Now that you’re done shopping and you cart is so close to full that you had it, your turn has come to join the waitline of fulfilled buyers. You push your cart and way into the tight passageway to the cashier. Looking sideways through this fake arcade, you are to notice the faces through which the world of the tabloids scans you, and your fingertips are given the itch: to buy or not to buy? Light question, meant for light-perversions. Consumer, you, potential buyer whom art made free by that potential alone: these are the faces constellated unto fame in North America; these are the stars which accompany your slow walk through the wind tunnel of exchange. Before money and merchandise will have changed hands, you get distracted by the faces you have seen many times too many. You get news from the other world – the world of fame. They are there-for-here: Britney Spears is a star, Michael Jordan was a star, as were the sturdy Rolling Stones; Bill Gates is a star, Brad Pitt is Angelina Jolie is a star… To the bulky book sellers of the day, Paolo Coelho is a star, and so are J.K. Rowland and Dan Brown. To the sports aficionados, Ronaldinho is a star and Michael Schumacher is a star, Venus and Serena Williams are star sisters, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are co-stars, and Tiger Woods, what a star he is!
The skies of popCulture are star full – not exhaustive but exhausting, the inertia of enumeration leaves no room for the Copernican void; those stars shine down on you with entertaining twinkles which jam Pascal’s silent, infinite spaces. They keep coming at you from TV and computer screens; you can cruise the pages of glossy, gossipy tabloids with your fingers’ close control: they, the icons of popCulture are everywhere. They give you little jolts out of the conceptual tunnel of exchange you are crossing now. Stars come – from above, don’t they? – to offer you a glimpse at the ecstatic other of money. They come and come down again and rain over you the fervor of that repetition which is the mother of pop.
Under this siege of shooting stars of which you are the target, the tables turn: your spirit opens up the bottle; you see the Heideggerian 7Up bubbles going always up, from an origin too light to fathom. The highbrow culture of the bubbles appears to shine as an exasperated reversal of the lowbrow culture of the stars; Heidegger’s origins – the reverse of, resistance to, and disemployed essence of the bulk of Britney Spears. With each reiteration of the star’s presence, popCulture reasserts its disdain for uniqueness, for that old and revered original whose distance Benjamin calls “aura”. The highbrow sacred cows of the original work of art (stand up to enlist Leonardo, Virgil, Dante & comp!) are chosen to match that One that generates it all. Yet, an uninhibited inhabitant of cultures pop and not – Gilles Deleuze – tells us that the One, the first One, is nothing more than a unit subtracted from a multiplicity. Highbrow art – and its systems of support such as critical theory, comparative literature, and philosophical aesthetics – will be regarded as the willing suspension of the multiplicity from which the high One, once subtracted, erases its tracks to take over the world. In turn, popCulture knows – with a low brow but not with downcast eyes – that the One is not enough: One is depressing. Einmal ist dismal. The star twinkles – an intermittently blinding play between one, many and no Other. The one that is the many is the star. It lures the many consumers into the trap that it is, into the happy identification that gives them a partly playful identity: to be one with it through the manifolds of limp life. The star mends auras: it represents as many of you as there are there, it elicits your desire as a multitude restored in one – your – self.
What, you don’t go for it? Does Céline Dion make you cringe? You can’t stand the face of best-selling Tom Cruise? You don’t buy Britney Spears for a sec? You think that she sublimates suburbia as a Dasein made of plastic must? That she is a concoction of the Sony corporate musical executives? You’re ready to submit that stars bear the empty touch of fame? Why not? It’s a free country, after all (have been subjected): it’s your right not to go for these Big Brothers and Kinky Sisters, and to rebuff the extended family from heaven and hell given to you – by God! – culturally. Le goût oblige – taste is for the strong, the weak and the atypical – but you still have to cross the tunnel to the cashier and pay to stay legal while you shell yourself out of the tabloid shiny shadows’ gate of ivory. Money and stuff change hands at the apex of exchange, that moment out of time when hands become claws in the ecstasy of the law of grabity. After the petite catharsis that has just cleansed you of the star flakes, you get out of the mall, free like a bird. You are now in the parking lot […]