This is not performance art. This is not stand-up comedy. This is not cabaret. This is not theater. It’s too late for theater, people!
This is just you and me in the post-gentrified landscape.
Gentrification is over. Hyper-gentrification is over. We have been colonized!
(With Penny Arcade in “Longing Lasts Longer” at St. Ann’s Warehouse. Photo by Riff Chorusriff. December 9, 2016....
While developing her show at Joe’s Pub back in 2014, Ms. Arcade offered a chillingly detailed account as to how America invaded New York City. You can check out the particulars in the report I did here:
http://notesonnewyork.tumblr.com/post/103257641573/penny-arcade-in-longing-lasts-longer-joes-pub
In her latest rendition of “Longing Lasts Longer,” however, she pivots away from mourning for the city and probes where things stand now. What emerges in the post-gentrified landscape? What does this colonization actually look like? For Ms. Arcade, she sees the onslaught of what French philosopher Guy Debord prophesied would arrive in his 1967 book “La societe du spectacle”:
The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.... The spectacle is...the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.
In other words, the post-gentrified panorama is one where the distinctive cultural values of New York City have been upended and replaced. But replaced by what? As Debord foretold, it’s the homogeneity of one monolithic spectacle. If you didn’t record it, photograph it, tweet it, post it, text it, share it, or like it, you’re not contributing any value to society. Everything has become a commodity and, as Debord noted, people “love to fetishize the latest commodity.” Similarly, Ms. Arcade explained that “you're not actually alive and successful unless” you’re supporting how “awesome” that new TV show, hairstyle, dress, or whatever is. If the thing is being mass-marketed to the right “target demographic” or the so-called “influencers” have made it “all the rage,” that’s all that matters to certify its worth.
But isn’t it curious how the target demographic is usually between the ages of 16 and 25 years old? Okay, maybe more like 18 to 35 but, as Ms. Arcade mused, “No one’s poor [in that group], everyone’s eating $25 ramen instead of 25 meals of $1 ramen.” And they don’t stop! This goes to the heart of what Debord meant when he wrote that the spectacle “basks in the perpetual warmth of it own glory.” If you join the spectacle, you become “unmoored from history” as if on an expanding LSD trip savoring the experience of your wonderfully new lobotomy. Mindful of the danger, Ms. Arcade remarked:
These delicacies [like eating exorbitantly priced meals] were once reserved for distracting us from reality, rewarding us even; but now, we consume them constantly and are therefore in a constant state of distraction.
Of course, that’s what the continued success of the spectacle depends on: our passivity. You might feel like you’re participating in something but, in reality, everything’s safe, you feel protected, and you’re hanging out with people who agree with every opinion you have. As Debord figured,
By means of the spectacle, the ruling order discourses endlessly upon itself in an uninterrupted monologue of self-praise.
Offered a chance at easy glory, who can resist the temptation? But New York City has never been a passive place--the city forces you to engage it each time you walk out your door to do anything--so how could it ever be colonized given this seemingly insurmountable defense? Well, as Roger Waters mumbles in his recently prescient song “Smell the Roses”: “C’mon, hon-ey. It’s real...mon-ey!”
According to Ms. Arcade, intellectualism and the exchange of ideas once sat atop the pyramid of the New York value system. They both required critical thinking, give and take, and a robust engagement with people--all anathema to the spectacle. But when accumulating money suddenly became the sole notion of success, the city was shaken. You see, having mounds of money may not buy you love, but it does get you this: insulation, immunity from conflict if you wish, and that “perpetual warmth of its own glory.” As Arcade has argued before, this was a springboard for the initial wave of gentrification:
Wealthy people who once partied with the gentry in their neighborhoods now want to live in those neighborhoods, replacing the very people whose company they sought.
Their money protected them from having to empathize with those they were replacing. They would never have to have any conversations with them. Instead, they could praise themselves for driving up property prices, bringing “better” businesses to the neighborhood, cleaning up the streets, and so on. After all, as Debord imagined,
For the spectacle, as the perfect image of the ruling economic order, ends are nothing and development is all--although the only things into which the spectacle plans to develop is itself.
Again, as I mentioned earlier, if you don’t record, photograph, tweet, post, text, share, or like this new economic order, you’re completely discounted. If you don’t sit back idly snickering at everything and, instead, are moved to a disruptive action, the spectacle will scoff, “Sit down, honey, you’re wrecking the show.”
So, given the pull of its gravity, how can anyone stave off being sucked into the spectacle? Well, Ms. Arcade suggested this:
[Remember], only you can make yourself truly happy. Being happy is a personal choice.
You don’t have to accept the spectacle’s mass-marketed projections. You can remember you originally came to New York to “escape the Puritanism of the country and rural areas.” You came to “be anonymous and find those secret places to explore.” You came to find “true happiness in solitude.” Most importantly, she declared,
Longing lasts longer than nostalgia.
Nostalgia, after all, is something the spectacle can commodify and sell back to you. Ms. Arcade cautioned that it’s passive to want to be the person you were in the past. Instead, you must keep longing because
Longing is a desire to keep connected, to keep evolving with your physical [home, church, apartment, building, block, et cetera] and personal histories.
It’s the only way forward in a post-gentrified landscape.)
