Entering through a revolving door, Marshall Blonsky takes stock of his surroundings.
”This is a church!” he declares. ”A postmodern church!”
Not really. This is Nike Town, the big, new Michigan Avenue store where you can pay well over a C-note for a pair of sneakers.
Blonsky`s not daft; he`s a semiotician, an academic who peers beneath the surface of the familiar in a search for deeper truths.
”Look,” he says, ”there`s God!”
Blonsky is not that far off this time.
He`s gazing at an elevated, life-size, spot-lighted, suspended-in-air statue of Michael Jordan taking a jump shot.
”Listen!” Blonsky says, absorbing the audial flow from the store`s sound system. ”What`s that in my ears? You`ve got a soft, almost subliminal crowd roar, you`ve got soothing, transcendental music. And chimes!”
Plus bird calls.
”It`s as if we were indeed in a postmodern shrine of some kind,”
Blonsky says. ”Or maybe an asylum.”
He`s excited, speaking fast, on a roll, stammering now and then, building to a point: ”The first thing I notice is there`s no limen! You walk in and you`re up to your eyeballs and ears in hyperspace!”
Time out.
Fine and dandy, the guy`s a semiotician, which probably beats working, but what does he do exactly and what`s all this talk about postmodern and limen and hyperspace? And does he want to buy some Air Jordans or not?
Good questions.
Marshall Blonsky is a professor from New York City who teaches at New York University and the New School for Social Research. He`s also the author of the recently published ”American Mythologies” (Oxford University Press), which for the average reader provides an entertaining and accessible crash course in understanding the world through semiotic eyes, which are trained to decode.
Like the other words, decode is part of the speciality`s jargon. To decode is to interpret. Blonsky will translate the remaining terms for us later. First, some basics:
A theater of signs
A semiotician (see-me-oh-TISH-un) studies the signs and symbols of society in order to discover their underlying meaning.
”The ordinary person walks down the street and sees things; the semiotician sees signs,” Blonsky explains, quoting one of his champions, Roland Barthes (1915-80), the French intellectual who helped construct the philosophical framework of post-World War II semiotics.
He doesn`t mean street signs. He means unspoken messages, images and metaphors that are embedded in everything around us-in the clothes we wear and the cars we drive; in music and magazines, religion and advertising, architecture and TV, fashion and politics, pornography and furniture, aerobics and food, professional sports and laptop computers.
”The great American sociologist Erving Goffman teaches us that life is a great theater of signs,” Blonsky says.
(Our semioticians usually have degrees in other disciplines, for there are no graduate programs in semiotics in this country. Blonsky has a doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University.)
The theory is that signs and symbols are products and reflections of prevailing myths that shape and drive the values and beliefs of a culture, that speak to the unconscious, that manipulate us, ”that ignite our desire,” as Blonsky states in his book, ”and make us who we are.”
Weary ”of the academic ghetto” and ”feeling dusty and moth-eaten,” he writes, he decided four years ago to flee the classroom and travel wherever necessary ”to decode a series of American myths.”
You can get an idea of the result from the dust jacket, which is shocking pink-not indicating the sort of torpid, esoteric tome you expect from a pedant.
Blonsky is a former journalist who wrote celebrity profiles for the Saturday Evening Post until it folded in 1969. (It was soon reborn.)
He got turned onto semiotics at Johns Hopkins University, where he enrolled in 1970 to pursue a master`s in creative writing. From there he moved to Columbia and Yale, where he studied under the late Paul de Man, a founder of deconstructionism, which gets bad press for its tendency to pulverize text to prove its emptiness.
Blonsky also studied briefly in Paris under Barthes, and he again returned there for ”American Mythologies” to pick the profound brains of French scholars and savants.
Managers of myth
For ongn and domestic, who ”manage and create our myths.”
The list includes everyone from TV mannequin Vanna White to fashion designer Giorgio Armani, from performance artist Annie Sprinkl the codes”-
more lingo for getting backstage-at NBC News, ”Nightline” and ”Wheel of Fortune,” all of which, he insists, are windows into the national soul.
He ”loathed” Merv Griffin, the creator of ”Wheel of Fortune” who confided that it is designed so that the ”dork in the living room” can guess the answer ahead of the contestants.
He didn`t much care either for Ted Koppel of ”Nightline.” He accuses the red-haired interrogator of ”posing as fair and objective” while unfairly rattling his guests by talking to them only through an earpiece and not allowing them to see him. This, Blonsky says, punctures the pretense of fairness.
All in all, the final report is not a pretty picture.
American culture, Blonsky asserts, has conquered the world. It`s not that the people of foreign countries want to live like us, he says, it`s that they want to feel a part of what he calls ”The New Class.”
In other words, they want to be sharp, cool, hip. Or did those words go out in the `50s? At any rate, we`re the capital and chief distributor of Newness.
And what are the myths at the core of our exports?
Nothing to be proud of. Blonsky recites a few favorites: ”Violence is attractive. Glamor and power and freedom are absolutely essential. And youth. You have to be young forever. The pursuit of happiness is exclusively tied to consumption.”
If we`re the chief maker and distributor of Newness, we`re also its major consumer.
Just walk along a ritzy commercial district like Chicago`s Magnificent Mile with Blonsky and ask him to decode the passing parade and talk semiotic shop.
`Profundity has been lost`
Ripped denims? ”They`re saying see how erotic my new body is. Fitness is a religion. They have appropriated the clothing of the poor and made it fashionable. That`s a consequence of American postmodernism, which
appropriates from any culture and class.”
Define postmodernism. ”The consensus is that in the `60s and `70s, the human psyche began to be recoded, if you want to use the lingo; it got altered.
”The feeling is people are being produced that are different from the period before World War II. They`re more corporatist, less heroic and more ambitious; profundity has been lost.
”Movies are expressive of this change. They`re packed with special effects and devoid of characterization, narrative. And look at MTV.
”There`s a notion that every era has a dominant speed. The dominant speed of this era, to use the shorthand word, is postmodern capitalism-high consumption, high tech.
”Two other aspects of postmodernity are gigantism and simulacra, which you can see in everything from architecture to food.”
Simulacra? ”More lingo. A substitute for the original, which people don`t remember. Ralph Lauren`s Polo stores are simulacra for the Yale Club. The same for Big Macs, which are huge and bland. You can`t taste the meat for the pasty sauce. There`s a whole generation who don`t know what a real hamburger tastes like or have forgotten.”
Spandex and running shoes, clothing with sports-team logos? ”It`s a signal of adherence to this New Class, which I call urban nomads. With their ATM cards, cellular phones and laptop computers, they can go everywhere, cross boundaries without nationality being a problem.”
Vain search for stardom
Where does the glamor come in? ”The message is that to be happy you have to be a star, to actually try to approach the trajectory of popular idols. So all your life you`ll be searching-searching-searching, buying-buying-buying to get closer-closer-closer to the likeness of the star.
”But you`ll never get there, and deep inside we know this. That`s why we`ve become a culture of voyeur-assassins. We love the stars, but when you don`t make it to their level and know you never will, then the resentment and the envy build, and we attack our icons.”
Don`t get down, dude. If the semiotic overview is generally bleak, decoding itself can be fun, especially if it can make you feel superior.
Even actions are revealing. ”One example that Goffman wrote about is the person standing on a street corner who is ostentatiously looking at his or her watch,” Blonsky says. ”The person isn`t interested in the time. The person is signifying: `I`m not loitering; I have status; I`m on my way to an appointment.` ” Power.
Let`s try another. What about the fellows who tool around in Chevy Blazers and Ford Broncos? ”They`re saying, `I`m an outdoorsman. I`m virile after all. I am Crocodile Dundee.` ” More power.
And Range Rovers? ”I`m virile and loaded with money.” Real power.
If you`re obsessive, as Blonsky confesses he is, decoding can also get to be a burden, like being Superman and not being able to turn off your X-ray eyes.
At large in Nike Town
But if he`s gotta do what he`s gotta do, why not turn him loose in Nike Town, which is a perfect blind date for a semiotician.
Starting with the hyperspace at the entrance. Remember?
So, Marshall, what is it?
”Hyperspace,” he says, ”means space so full, so bristling, so rich with signs that there`s no room for you to be detached. You can`t keep a critical distance because there is no distance.”
In traditional buildings, he says, there`s ”a lobby, a limen-a word for threshold . . .”
dings, however, you`re instantly submerged in hyperspace.
Now Blonsky`s on the second floor, looking for the escalator to the third. ”This place is designed so you lose your way, which is another feature of postmodern stores. Traditional department stores are laid out so you know precisely where everything is. In the postmodern store, you can`t map the space.”
In a viewing room of Nike commercials, he watches Jordan, in shadow, glide in slow motion to the hoop. ”There`s no difference today between a commercial and a feature film. The commercial has the same status.”
Time to go. ”What we`re worshiping here is materialism. Today, for many people, there are no coherent ideologies in which to believe, so the ideology becomes the commodity itself. Not a word has to be said, not a belief system offered. Nike is the ideology, the commodity is the final good. The shoe, the magnificent, glittery swoosh logo.”
Depressing, huh?
Ah, but Blonsky has a suggestion. ”With apologies to Nike, just don`t do it. The answer is to recognize and understand the images and messages you are bombarded with. Find a crevice that is safe. Make human connections.”
That`s it? Something that simple?
”Try it,” Marshall Blonsky says. ”It`s not easy.”
