In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 7 The Tension of Absurdity There was a glass cabinet adrift in the foyer’s center containing souvenirs which were, sadly, crappy rather than tacky—faded postcards, factory-woven ‘‘ethnic fabrics,’’ and so on. I was hoping for a boxed set of miniature Burmese generals, or at the very least an I LOVE MYANMAR fridge magnet. Or perhaps a length of barbed wire, tastefully mounted, to commemorate the recent news, publicized without irony, that Burma now produced so much of the stuff it had begun exporting it —Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People Before we leave the city limits and witness the suffering and dissociative strategies of the peri-urban poor, let us indulge in some dark humor, some subversive sayings, and perhaps even a little karaoke with friends. In short, let us discover the limits of discourse as a survival strategy. As the city becomes a modern vista, unrecognizable to its inhabitants, these same inhabitants work assiduously with words to re-politicize their landscape and to recover the truth of their nation’s recent history. Ernst Bloch slyly noted that although the fascist claims to a utopian worker’s future are false, the myths (such as unity, progress, and fraternity) behind it are not exhausted by their use, and there is no reason why the populace may not use these same terms, reappropriated, in new ways to express alternate understandings of the past and visions of the future. In this chapter I present several furtive and only half-jocular ways in which the veneers of modernity and conformity in contemporary Burma may be punctured. I begin with the ever-present sense of absurdity and surrealism and move on to reportage of the urban war on semantics and a variety of tea shop pastimes such as lampooning and betting. The Tension of Absurdity 121 Artifice and Mimesis as Urban Reality Walter Benjamin has advocated a radical view of history in which the concept of ‘‘order’’ is extraordinary and the potential for equality and revolutionary change is subsumed by a myth of prosperity. Benjamin’s review of history convinced him that a particular political constellation of ‘‘national unity, patriotism, and consumerism’’ recurred throughout history and this formula ‘‘inevitably resulted in the betrayal of the working class’’ (Buck-Morss 1989:322). This circumstance constitutes, for Benjamin, a state of emergency. In the work of Benjamin, the phenomenon of the Arcades, the center point of the ‘‘new urbanism,’’ led to the reenchantment of post-industrial Europe with the range of new consumer goods encased in these glass fairylands. Kracauer (1975:64) described these ‘‘pleasure barracks’’ as well, using the ‘‘distraction factory’’ as a metaphor for the places where the middle class spends its leisure time. It was in the pleasure barracks and distraction factories equally as much as in the fascist propaganda and state spectacles, that Benjamin noted the changing perception of ‘‘people as producers’’ to ‘‘people as consumers.’’ He adopts Marx’s definition of ‘‘phantasmagoria’’ to describe this process of creating fetishes from commodities through their display rather than their exchange value (Buck-Morss 1989:81). The Arcades gave the impression of novelty through the sheer variety and number of material objects available for consumption. Rather than selecting a fabric for a milliner to make a hat, Arcades stocked an array of hats that could be visibly consumed even if the customer could not afford to purchase one. It was the beginning of the voyeurism that is ‘‘window shopping.’’ The Arcades gave an allusion of plenty and wealth with large expanses of glass and bright lighting. These emergent forms of modernism are painfully evident in the Union of Myanmar. In the past decade the junta has constructed its own ‘‘fairy grottoes.’’ Burmese Fairylands include joint-venture Asian department stores, ‘‘duty-free’’ stores, and karaoke nightclubs. In the Sino-Burmese Department Stores, gaping Burmese ride up and down escalators, unable to afford the products well guarded by the staff. The escalators are free, however, and represent as great a spectacle as the rows of glittering Chinese cookware. The banks of television screens in these department stores are similarly the scenes of mass gatherings as scores of monks (from up-country, I was repeatedly told) come daily to watch Bon Jovi music videos on this latest miracle of technology. Only in the latter part of the 1990s, however, has surrealism become an integral aspect of State-led modernity. Shopping, for example, has [18.191.46.36] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 15...

Share