An Ambivalent Case for Consumerism as Religious Style

Thrive, cities! Bring your freight, bring your shows, ample and sufficient rivers!
Expand, being than which none else is perhaps more spiritual!
Keep your places, objects than which none else is more lasting!

—Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”

A picture of God from the Gospel of Promethea.

There is a way of conceiving the twenty-first century city as an invading, colonizing god. Although the categories of urban and rural contradicted each other in the popular imagination for at least three hundred years, the categories themselves were internally incoherent: the city representing both progress and regression, plutocracy and indigence, glamor and depravity; its opposite the pure, nostalgic vision of what we wished we were before we had memory, a chthonic place where social connections are strong commitments to community, but also one that is ignorant, silenceable, disconnected. What continued (and continues) to distinguish the urban and the rural from one another is access. When I lived in Newark—which you might not be aware is the same public transit time to Union Square as Carroll Gardens, and twenty minutes faster to NY Penn Station—I had access to the cuisines of every country if not region in Eastern Asia, to readings by writers as diverse as Junot Diaz, Roxane Gay, Billy Collins, and Suzanne Collins, to just about any training possible, to a billion things more than this.

Ahoy.

Because I grew up in a town with a mighty 3000+ population and because other cities I’ve lived in include Chicago and Paris, maintaining this access is something very important to me. In Robert Orsi’s introduction to Gods of the City, he reminds people like me that the type of atomized, privileged access to knowledge, culture, and power I desire does not characterize the experience of all city-dwellers. Nevertheless, he also recognizes that the city is not quite as simple as a collection of people who can be divided into privileged/underprivileged, oppressor/oppressed. Rather, people live at the interstices. They believe, but only in negotiation with one thing or another, internalizing and navigating a host of social, historical, personal, cultural, and economic forces that form a palimpsest of imaginary topographies.

So, Orsi’s talking about religion here. That metaphysical concepts become mapped out onto existing grids in the city. That there is no essentialist religious identity that is impermeable and discreet and expresses itself identically regardless of place. I would have to agree with this. But when he defines urban religion (“what comes from the dynamic engagement of religious traditions… with specific features of the industrial and post-industrial cityscapes and with the social conditions of city life” (43)), I wonder if “urban religion” might not be the way one practices religion, the way one believes today.

When a small town, (heterodox) Catholic boy such as myself moves to a city, he has options for faith practice. There’s the Portugeuese parish where the English mass features an extensive homily on why one should bury their parents in a Catholic rather than cremate them. There’s the Italian American parish whose homilies have been translated word for word from the Glen Beck radio hour into Liturgical American English (LAE). There’s a parish run by women priests who were ordained secretly somewhere in the Black Forest by a rogue bishop, where the thirteen parishioners contribute to the homily. There’s also a kung fu school, which features sophisticated training in kicking ass, manipulating qi, fong soi (his sigung is Cantonese), healing practices, and a three-week-long celebration of Chinese New Year with full dragon and lion regalia. There’s also the Thelema lodge on Long Island, the Park51 community center, evangelical Korean teenagers who stop people in the occult section of the Barnes and Noble in Clifton, New Jersey.

The boy chose this.

This is to say nothing about other religious sites such as Midtown Comics, Madison Square Garden, and the headquarters for HBO.

I may be into some serious syncretism, some chaos magic, but I feel that this is not dissimilar to the way religion is practiced elsewhere, practiced the way one practices a commodity, which is to say to use it, adapt it, even as it conforms one’s will back into the model of late capital, the consumerist, infotextual system we are all part of. Take, for instance, the Catholicism of my hometown. It is disconnected physically from the metropole, right? Well it also is one that performs its expression through the lens of  charismatic practices that can trace its genealogy from some church somebody coming into contact with other practices—such as the ones found in some Pentecostal denominations—and remixing them. Even locally, there are places of grace that defy both the force of the romantic sublime and the weight of the old homes of eldritch saints and gods. I remember a local business leader who came to speak at my church when I was twelve or so who told the story of meeting Mary at the shipyard he owned amidst stacks of pipes and whatever industrial stuff. Soon, there was an old man who had a mystical cross in his window. Then, a donut-shop owner organized a trip to Conyers for the “last” apparition of Mary.

The 1998 Virgin Mary Farewell Tour.

People in Chauvin not only take their religion very seriously albeit sentimentally, but they also create it from fragments of imaginary pasts, negotiating official Catholicism with mystical pieties that come as much from Hollywood as they do from feast days. They put crawfish on the St. Joseph’s day altar, pulling in New Orleans, Italian Catholic culture and eliding its genealogy, adapting and transforming it. Their children move away and argue with them on issues of faith and politics having all become cynical with the church and heretical in faith. They, the parents and the children, often negotiate their ethics and beliefs through the television and the Internet. And even as the small town case is often the example used to prove the difference of urban things, now it is increasingly hard to peel back the layers of the religious, political, and cultural maps to find a Chauvin that is not already a part of the city, even as access to luxury goods and training are still a good bit of highway away.

One must contend with the fact that religious practice is not (and never could have been) separate from the world. And worse still, it is marketable and often practical. But for me, one who wants to be hollowed out, to be a body without organs, for to better be absorbed (to better absorb) the big, Lacanian Other who is always incomplete and multitudinous (like me, a little o, singing with the voice of Saint Walt: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes”), this is a relief, a blessing. Orsi points toward the right place where this happens: the cracks, the moments of contradiction and confrontation between place and ideology, culture and politics, body and body.

I always find myself suspicious any time the word “authenticity” comes up. It is a bourgeois concept, apparently, to be concerned with whether what one does with one’s time is real enough. T. J. Jackson Lears, man of many initials and cultural historian at Rutgers, traces anxiety about authenticity and whether modernism had a role in its eventual demise to the shifting cultural climes of the America in the nineteenth century in his book No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. His most useful argument is perfect, ironic schadenfreude: the antimodern sentiments of upper class white men was so contingent upon modern comforts, that it basically turned into neoliberal capitalism primed to run rampant on the twentieth century.

And yet, here we are, still picking through the forest looking for some comforting authenticity: rejecting the Brooklyn lit scene to grow pumpkins on an upstate commune, wishing for days of summer better remembered by an episode of Dawson’s Creek than by us, a sorry lot of workers. This is just as it was in the 1960s and 70s when biology majors dropped out of University of Chicago to join the bioregional movement in the Ozarks and folklorists in Louisiana tried to recapture a preAmericanized francophone culture along Bayou Teche. This is just as it was for the Shelleys and Byron and Polidori when they escaped to the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva for another impossible summer, telling ghost stories that refused—at the time—to be taxonomized by the hungry specter of the Enlightenment. Just as, as Lears tells it, Victorian men idolized the olden warrior spirit, promoted “traditional” craft markets, incorporated some of that old Catholic sensuality into their piety.

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Lears makes a compelling case for why his Gilded Age boys turned against progress and towards earnestness, fantasizing about an older gilded age that was impossibly better. His discussion of the attraction of the European medieval period was especially interesting, the ability to imagine it the way Rabelais did: brimming with fat, vital energy, washed in primary hues. I can also imagine the playhouses now, full of pince-nez, brocade, and hoop skirts, clapping at Peter Pan for to raise Tink from the dead (see above video for a taste!). This book makes a fine argument as long as we concede to Lears that white bourgeois anxiety was the major cause of a cultural hegemony, one that cannibalized all the people Lears did not talk about—the working class people who were more concerned about their endless, industrial workweek than their foi banalisée, the newly freed African Americans, the women who were neither arbiters of cultures (a tricky feat even with the right to vote) nor yielding comforters.

Perhaps also the force of capital was going to continue to avalanche regardless of the hobbies of Victorian dilettantes, that the rejection of the now has not been remarkably absent from premodern times, that authenticity, the trial of living a life worth living, is a concept history keeps struggling with. We accept authenticity, but only at a remove, something in a former life maybe. I get the sense that Lears sympathizes (or at least did in 1981 when he wrote this book) with the plight of the 19^th century intellectual looking at the terror of the city—maybe from an office at Columbia looking eastward over Amsterdam Avenue wishing Frederick Law Olmsted would hurry up and drop an oasis on the rocky slope of hill between the college and Harlem, a professor who might wish for something natural in a world increasingly unreal.

Poussin was down with nostalgia for the good old days, but it did make him consider DEATH.

You get the sense that if only this bourgeois antimodernism wasn’t co-opted by industry, by a reaffirmation of Enlightment rationality and emphasis on individual will, then maybe we’d be in a better place, one not still plagued by neurasthenia, the 19^th century word for pervasive mental illness. But maybe we should look at antimodernist sentiments as affectations created by the discourse of capitalism, which gave us the economic structure of progress? Maybe antimodernism isn’t the best word because it includes too much: the rallying cry of the Tea Party activist alongside the antinomian punk today, and Walt Whitman and Hitler back then? It is hard to say because antimodernist rhetoric is so prevalent today, and, even as I, too, am caught in the fist of capital and love wishing and imagining, I reject rejecting the modern.