Yesterday I was confronted with
Yesterday I was confronted with the statement, .New York is the capital of the world,. and I responded by saying “I disagree!”
No sooner had I made my assertion than was I asked to defend it, but for some reason I was not immediately able to do so. As I hesitated I was kindly reminded, by the person who presented me with the statement, of NYC superior cultural resorces, its size, and all of its otherwise unbelievable characteristics, as well as his opinion that there was really no question as to the correct answer. And yet my intuition was still to disagree. and then it dawned on me why I was unable to elaborate my postion in opostion to NYC being the capitol of the world. I realized that I was basing my opinion upon a notion of post-modernity that I somewhat took for granted, the idea of .the lost center.. The reason I could not accept New York as the capitol of the world, has nothing to do with what the city .is. or .is not. but rather with the fact that I think it is no longer possible to speak meaningfully about the world as though there is a point at which everything radiates. but my uncertainty remains. What does it mean to have .lost the center.?…the lost center: what I think I mean
First I feel like it is important to define more specifically what is meant when speaking about the world, and what can be meant when it is said that it has no center. I believe that what is meant by the world is .pop culture. and everything that is affected by it.
Ok so starting from there I think that what is characteristic of Pop, and what disallows a center to exist in contemporary culture, is the fact that pop does not rely upon a fixed context for the meaning of any specific object. That does not mean that there are not objects within pop culture that once had a cultural context, but by way of the fact that they participate in pop culture they have been de-contextualized.
I think that an example would be well appreciated at this point, because I realize that the phrase .cultural context. and term .de-contextualized. may not be very helpful by themselves. So I will define those terms and then I will attempt to put them into a practical example. Ok, by .cultural context. I mean the original place that an object, event or practice organically takes place. Examples of this might be, eating pasta in Italy, drinking coffee in Seattle, shopping for cloths at a local vender, or reading a book to gain information. By de-contextualized I mean the process by which an object, event or practice is taken out of its cultural context and used in a different way. A good example is Starbucks coffee. It is a a business whose original cultural context was the Pike Street Market in Seattle Washington, however as a part of pop culture it was decontextualized and now exists in a multitude of locals that are all very distinct and unrelated to its original cultural context.
So how does this help with the question of how the .center is lost.? well it does a number of things toward making the answering of the question easier. 1. it implies that at one point there was a center (it is hard to lose something that never was) and 2. it reveals the foundation of what it means to be living in a post-modern world.
So when did a center exist? The obvious answer here is also the right one. A center existed before the center was lost. I am not trying to be a smart-ass, really. What I mean is that up until the point where objects, practices, and events were taken out of context there original cultural context served as the center of that object, practice, or events meaning. If, for instance, you ate pasta in Italy it was meaningful because that is where eating pasta was centered, i.e. that is where that events cultural context was organically created. Similarly if you drank a cup of coffee in Star Bucks at Pike Street market it was meaningful because that is where the event of drinking coffee had organically developed (note: for something to have been centered, does not entail a universal, only an organic development, because clearly the Starbucks at the Pike Street Market was not the first coffee shop in the world).
So what is the foundation of living in a postmodern world? I think that this needs further explanation also, because to understand what is meant by postmodern one must first understand what is meant by the term Modern (on a side note, I am only including the terms modern and postmodern as a way of better understanding Pop as a function of contemporary culture, and I do know that I have most likely already crossed over the line of sounding like a naive pseudo-intellectual, but rest assured mental masturbation is not my intention, I am still only trying to clarify the idea of the .lost center. for myself and I am not trying to convince you or any one of anything). The age of the Modern is I think marked by an appeal to ideals and of truth. Examples of this are easy to see in the first and second world wars, in those conflicts there was a justification for the fighting, at least for the Americans, based upon the ideal or .truth. of the supremacy of democracy and capitalism.
Continuing to use the World Wars as an example I think that it was those events that led to a different type of appeal to truth as was manifested by revolt against it. And the development of Postmodernism. So that brings us back to the question of what postmodernism is. Post-modernism is simply as name implies that which is beyond or past the modern. So that mean that post modernism can not be defined positively in terms of what it is but rather that is can only be defined negatively in terms of what it is not. So post-modernism is not based upon ideals that are objective and true, for post modernism there is no Center. Everything is based upon relative experience. i.e. each and every event, practice, or object had meaning only insofar as meaning is assigned to it locally. An example of this would be eating pasta in my home in providence. The meaning of my meal exist only so far as I give create it. I cannot sit in my apartment and appeal to the pastas original cultural context as an ideal or .truth., because I am far removed from Italy and the ability to do so. I think that is, in a nut shell, the spirit of post modernism.
The idea of the .lost center. and pop culture can be seen as simply referring to the fact that every thing that we know in contemporary culture is the result of a process of decontextualzation.
And now it is possible for me to defend my disagreement with the statement that New York City is the Capitol of the world.
New York City would be the capitol of the world if the world had a capitol. But as the result of the reality of post modernism, speaking about NYC as a .center. or capitol would be the same as speaking about the Star Bucks down the street as though it were the original Starbucks, sure you could do it but it would be nonsense. Calling New York City the capitol of the world is nonsense.
What do you think?
…I would’ve just told the person that their declaration was arbitrary, but you just pounded them to dust! Good job.
“Nonsense” certainly is a word that comes to mind!
Hmm, well, maybe I’m on a bit of a different page, but I would argue with you even about the whole idea of pasta being original to Italy, as it was invented in China, and with of course Starbucks holding any claim to coffee, as I believe it originated in South America.
As for capitols, yes, that is completley arbitrary. Maybe New York is the cultural capitol of the United States. That I would agree with. But there are bigger cities. Do people in Toyko think New York is the center of the world? Or Sao Paulo, for example?
Here is some research on the matter:
1. Seoul - Korean Soul (Soul-t’ukpyolsi) - the capital city of South Korea, in ancient times the capital of the Baekje Kingdom (18 B.C. ~ 660 A.D.) 10,231,217
2. S?o Paulo - the largest city in Brazil and the capital of the captaincy (state) Sao Paulo, founded as S?o Paulo de Piratininga in 1554. 10,009,231*
3. Bombay - Marathi Mumbai, capital of Maharashtra state, India, port to the Arabian Sea and one of the most densely populated cities in the world. 9,925,891
4. Jakarta - formerly (until 1949) Batavia, from (1949-72) Djakarta, largest city and the capital of Indonesia 9,373,900
5. Karachi - largest city and business capital of Pakistan. 9,339,023
6. Moscow Moskva - the political center and the capital of the Russian Federation, first written mention of Moscow dates back to 1147 8,297,056
7. Istanbul - formerly Constantinople, the largest city and seaport of Turkey. 8,260,438
8. Mexico City - in ancient times the pre-Columbian city Tenochtitl?n, today the capital city of the United States of Mexico, founded in 1325. 8,235,744
9. Shanghai - One of the world’s largest seaports and a major industrial centre of China. 8,214,384
10. Tokyo - the “Eastern Capital”, formerly Edo (until 1868), the capital and largest city of Japan. 8,130,408
11. New York City - The city of the five ‘boroughs’: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island (formerly Richmond), largest city of the United States
From this list, New York looks pretty minor. Does this person want to say that New York City is the financial capitol of the world? That too would be disputed, I believe, as many people say that London takes the lead.
I would say that that person is being, what’s the word, an American?
As for postmodernism and the loss of a center, I don’t know — which airport has the largest variety of flights — for example, which city is most like that Plaza in Madrid you are talking about? Nothing is the center because we have so many contexts. Perhaps one could say that America is the center of the political world because of our military and economic strength. But that still does not make America the center, in terms of the everyday people of most people in the world, of which Americans comprise a small percentage.
Modernism would say something about truth and morals as the center. There’s the whole idea of the family as the center. I would say that is probably true in most of the world today. And then there is the Western concept of the individual as the center, but this, perhaps, is the exception of world-wide belief rather than the rule. But, your question of the world? WStrangely, we often define the world as the earth. But in our solar system, one big world, the sun would be the center. And in the universe, we have no clue. So, New York is a pinprick, and the person who made such a claim was thinking with as much brain power at the perhaps. But, alas, I stoop to insults because I want to think I’m smarter or that I have thought this out more. Really, what is this? It’s a comment that may never be read, but at least I have put myself and my words and their words and New York into a litle more perspective.
word.
I hear ya sister. Right on. Tell it like it is.