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Popular Culture Review
The Las Vegas experience suggests all three tasks. Here the visitor repetitively
faces the terrors of nature and of death, survives instead of succumbs, and is
hedonistically compensated for being shackled by civilization.
Paradoxically, what Las Vegas offers is the ability to play with fate in a
civilized manner: Individual desire is teased, then tempted, and finally tempered
by environmental landscapes producing an immersion into a timeless and
mythological world. In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi argues two
points: first, architecture enlists symbols from past mythologies, guaranteeing
that the visitor imagines and ultimately acts out desire; second, and of primal
importance, is that the experience happens as a communal one with the ability of
participants to communicate with each other at a variety of levels (Colquhoun,
qtd. in Venturi 131). In other words, architecture encourages a mythic
experience. Not only does Venturi argue architecture’s achievement in this
effort, he also maintains that without the opportunity to experience mythic
imagination, communication as a universal community project cannot survive.
Giambattista Vico makes a similar argument advocating the experience
of irrationality. According to Vico, irrationality is expressed through symbols
and myth as a form of aesthetic experience that is not only desirable, but
necessary for a society, and in this case, a global society, to continue (Deneen
187). So strongly did Vico believe in myth as necessary for the social fabric, he
suggested that the Enlightenment project—^which denigrates the importance of
myth in favor of reason, science, and education—is in fact a threat to the social
bond (30).
Taking the opposite view of myth—as do Vico, Freud, and Benjamin,
among others—Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno side with the
Enlightenment project of the rational and argue to “deny myth a place of esteem
in modernity” (Deneen 170). Fittingly, the mythic masterpiece that Vico, on the
one hand, and Horkheimer and Adorno, on the other, hold up as the metaphor
for all of Western civilization is Homer’s Odyssey: Vico with awe, Horkheimer
and Adorno with disdain. Vico calls the Odyssey sublime; Horkheimer and
Adorno argue that the Odyssey represents the undifferentiated individual who is
at once dominated by the fates in a cesspool of seduction, but wiio, when able to
assert his individual autonomy, is exploitive of both nature and of human beings.
Just as the Odyssey stands for western civilization, the Las Vegas Strip
experience stands for the 21®* century global circulation of money, desire, and
power. The comparison of the two, the epic and the city, serves to broaden the
vision with which Las Vegas is judged. Instead of looking at Las Vegas through
the lens of the negative aesthetics of Horkheimer and Adorno which faults
popular culture for subsuming individual autonomy by seduction, this paper
suggests that the aesthetics of Vico and Venturi, of Freud and Benjamin,
produce a much richer imderstanding of the complicated dynamics that have
created and sustained the Las Vegas experience.