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i was thinking about this while i ws being dragged around outside on the far end of a huskyleash: the "national psyche" as a construct, the ideal-typical recipient for conservative ideological memes, and so the subject-position built into those memes, taken in sequence: the optimized receiver post, the presumed addressee of these messages. when you read them, or receive them (these memes) you can allow yourself to be enframed by them, so they appear to speak to and for you. since this positioning is never without accompanying claims, this act of being-enframed (interpellation in althusserspeak) is never neutral: so you position yourself as you allow yourself to be positioned, and you position yourself via assent as an element within this "national psyche".....and because the whole of conservative ideology is predicated on the notion of the nation, and within that on the notion of a "national will" it follows that to position yourself as an element within the "national psyche" is to position yourself on conservative ideological grounds.
conservatives like to imagine this national will/national psyche as being identical with themselves, politically speaking, and by extension as being "unified" it would follow that the "national pysche" or will has to be referenced in the singular, as if by dissenting you fall outside of it, fall outside of the "nation" as conservative like to think of it.
seems a pretty effective way of getting folk to police what they think, doesnt it? and to experience it, all you need to do is buy the underlying mythology enough that conservative ideological propositions--which effectively tell you how to react as they tell you about the world as that ideology allow it to be understood--seem to make sense to you intuitively.
if that happens, then dissent in any meaningful sense of the term threatens to push you off the edge of the earth. and all that is Out There is chaos.
so it is no wonder that you worry about that, mr jazz: if you find these types of sentences to be compelling, and you read them as they "should" be read, you react as you are instructed to without that requiring much of any effort beyond the normal assimilation of infotainment in written form.
its all about this goofball noun "nation" and what it entails.
and in the hands of the right, that noun is about the least democratic possible. because its inclusive effects are all about exclusion. what you see in it depends on where you find yourself falling in relation to the propositions that use it.
i dont find anything commonsensical about that word. i dont find it to be anything other than an ideological function.
when i read books of american history written by americans, i find the same tic everywhere: the american mind, the american people, the american nation: all are first person plural names that get to run around and do things: it (the noun) assesses, reacts, does stuff, goes to a bar, has a few beverages, stumbles home, like the good mr. zappa talked about back in the day.
it is all about a strange, and very particular fantasy of unity where none necessarily exists.
i have never understood why americanists indulge this particular mythology, but they do, and all the bloody time.
i guess the word "nation" appeals at some level, so the host of analytic problems that should be raised about it arent raised.
and so all these first person plural standins for nation get to do stuff.
very strange.
anyway, without the notion of nation, conservative ideology has no signifieds. it already has no referent, but in that it is not different from anything else.
the material host posted above gets to the same point, i think, in a kind of historically oriented fashion.
i wonder if this qualifies as a rant.
huh.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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