"The Chicago Experience"--The City as Hyperreal

It's a curious thing. I've lived in and around Chicago all my life and have experienced the diverse aspects of this teeming city, yet it was only recently I had The Chicago Experience, de rigueur for every tourist. At night, with friends, on impulse, strolling past the Sears Tower, a building I have always gawked at but never entered, I decided to venture to its renowned heights to view the luminosity of the urban terrain. I was astonished-not so much at the novel spectacle of a sprawling city of lights, reduced to a miniature model of itself, but at the commodification of the and its ideological import. Perhaps the problem begins with the word itself. Once a concept guarded by philosophy, it has been taken over by the new imperial discourse, advertising. When we speak of experience today, we no longer refer to primary and secondary impressions, to a priori and a posteriori ideas or, less academically, to a wealth of wisdom and knowledge accumulated slowly and painfully. Rather we speak of a ready-made, pre-packaged bundle of sensations available for a fee, an identity or lifestyle for sale, a safe and sanitized world of happiness and pleasure presented as a concept, symbol, or sign to be conspicuously consumed. Immediate gratification through exchangethat is the promise of contemporary life, the postmodern version of existentialism. No angst or uncertainty here. When instant coffee brings instant civilization, as the Maxwell House ad guarantees, or when this type of association can be made at all, our whole framework of meaning is displaced, abolished in the vacuum of supercharged signifiers signifying only their own manipulated meanings. Mythical thought, the of the bourgeoisie, builds ideological castles out of the debris that was once a social discourse (Levi-Strauss). If I had lived in the sixteenth or seventeenth century as described by Foucault, I would no doubt believe that I had a direct pipeline to reality, whether through a complex web of resemblances or through the representational mirror of language. Being thoroughly (post-) modern, I am disabused of this notion and I believe instead that my experiences are, rather, experiences of experiences, that is, of the encoding process of my body, culture, and history

Media studies · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · University Challenges and Reforms

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  Open Access•R G Smith•Futures•2021

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