Once upon a time, there was a poetry of consumerism.
I’m thinking here of how buying stuff was celebrated through the ironic creativity of mid 20th century urbanites. Rather than grousing about the vulgarity of their city, these souls were inspired by its arty and tacky qualities. Informed by a nearly utopian cornucopia of consumer goods, they created witty fables of abundance.
Think of the pop artists and their love of such consumables as canned soup, comic books and hamburgers. Or of Frank O’Hara, writing poems about strolling through Manhattan, shopping for a carton of Gauloises, an edition of Verlaine, a malted, or musing on the pleasures of sharing a coke with intimate friends.
Of course, New York City is still one of the world’s great shopping meccas. The process of gentrification has, if anything, created the need for more high-end stores. But this is why the appearance of another phenomenon seems all the more striking: the increasing presence of empty storefronts, sometimes whole blocks of them.
Perhaps we live in a time that demands another sort of poetry. Poems, for example, like this one, from (my better half) Elaine Equi:
RETAIL SPACE FOR RENT
Every day emptiness erases
big franchises
as well as small boutiques:
the place that sold small gadgets,
the place that specialized in hats.
It’s a commercial version
of the Rapture — leaving behind
a jigsaw puzzle of blank pieces,
each one an unopened invitation
to anyone with an ounce of creative vision
and the millions needed to back it up.
If this were a movie, aliens would be arriving
to set up their ministry,
but today even the sky seems vacant.
We’re dissolving the past
faster than we can manufacture the future.
Lots of everything must go.
Not enough coming soon.
Equi’s poem comes from her new book, The Intangibles. The title is prescient; confronted by such a phenomenon like disappearing stores, one can’t help but think that some mysterious, invisible process is taking place. Again, a look back to the time of Warhol and O’Hara, offers an illuminating contrast. In one of that era’s signature essays, Susan Sontag also described the apocalyptic image of empty stores:
“The trump card of the end-of-the-world movies...is that great scene with New York or London or Tokyo discovered empty, its entire population annihilated. Or, as in The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), the whole movie can be devoted to the fantasy of occupying the deserted city and starting all over again -- Robinson Crusoe on a world-wide scale."
Equi’s poem of 2019 offers a perfect dialectical contrast with Sontag’s early 60s essay. In Sontag’s city, the people are gone, but the goods are left behind. In Equi’s, people still roam the streets, but it’s the consumer products that have disappeared.
Sontag’s offers a reflection on spectacle (film imagery); Equi’s poem is determined by an encounter with the Real — an emptiness stripped of signage altogether: “If this were a movie,” she writes, “aliens would be arriving, / to set up their ministry, / but today even the sky seems vacant.”
A Commercial Version of the Rapture
So, where exactly have all the goodies gone?
The short answer: they’ve gone to heaven.
Put another way, value once expressed itself in our world in the form of concrete, sensuous items, such as consumer goods. Today, thanks to the financialization of everyday life, it also has assumed an immaterial form; tangible value has become intangible — transformed into abstract equations.
Think about the history of money from the 60s till today. At one time, wealth was expressed through gold. This transformed into paper currency, which further evolved into credit card balances. The process of abstraction continued. In our day, there’s bitcoin — but on an even more abstract level, there are the trillions of dollars created by a few keystrokes at the Fed to prop up the economy during the last great crash.
Have you ever seen a physical penny of all that dough?
When it comes to the disappearing stores of Manhattan, a similar process is occurring. First off, in a “commercial version of the Rapture” as Equi puts it, these enterprises have been subsumed out of their earthly existence and now live their afterlives in the heaven of cyberspace.
But there’s an even more extreme process of abstraction taking place.
Though many merchants vacate their businesses because the rent is too high, the real estate companies that own them resist bringing down the cost. Why? I’ve read that unfilled stores equate to tax write-offs for their holding companies. Not only that, but exorbitant (or exaggerated) rents, when they appear on balance sheets, may puff up the value of such properties.
In other words, by incurring losses (empty stores), buildings may be increasing their worth. Which reminds me of what I’ve read about banks: that by acquiring liabilities (making loans which are backed by only a small fraction of the bank’s reserves), they increase their assets (their balance sheets record money owed them).
Dematerialization is a sign of the evolving sophistication (or desperation) of capitalism, as it discovers new ways to generate profit out of increasingly thinner air. In this light, empty storefronts might be read as a perverse index of economic progress.
And by the evidence of such signs, you can’t help but speculate that China has already reached a more advanced stage of capitalism than the U.S. For there, one encounters not mere empty stores or even neighborhoods, but whole ghost towns, built on the fantasy of a future which never arrived.
All which is to say, just because you can’t see, hear, smell, taste or even understand a phenomenon, doesn’t mean you can’t make a killing from it. And that we poor mortals, left behind in the wake of our vanishing world, can take solace.
For despite appearances, the city that is disappearing still exists, in some inscrutable way, in the realm of the intangible.
