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ok so after a bike ride....
i think host's last post is entirely germaine: the only potential confusion lay in the fact that he may be responding to something i put in dc's thread earlier today as much as to what i may have put up here.
anyone who tries to think about the american situation in systemic terms sooner or later gets driven back into its sorry history. what differs amongst us is what each takes to be the canary in the mineshaft.
from my viewpoint, much of what host outlines above can be linked to the retreat into the historically dangerous and politically bankrupt notion of nation or national community, which drags all the problems of defining the "us" as over against the "them" back into play--in the present context, the "us" is pretty fucking small as a category--if you are poor you are out; if you are muslim you are out; if you operate in any political framework that is not reactionary you are out.....on and on...all this in what amounts to an exercise in (political) auto-therapy for the conservative set. but if that was all that is happening, then the question would be tedious--potentially horrific in its consequences, but conceptually tedious (i know this is a problematic statement, but such is my mood at the moment): it leans on the characteristics of the shared ideological set that all of us who pass through the american educational system have drilled into us, the center of which is the confusion of what is historically created with what is given in nature--so a category like "nation" comes to be presented in the same way as that of
"a rock." since we do not imagine that we make "a rock" (though in a sense we do given that we perceive the putative referent across the organizing features of the category "rock" which are simply those of nouns, enframed by syntacic regularities, individuated ideologically blah blah blah)...both "nation" and "rock" then are given---this is debilitating intellectually because it collapses a political category into a horizon of that-which-is-given-in-advance such that problems attending the meaning and status of nation become problems of the "natural" order of things. this is a condition of possibility for american conservative volk-bildung and the sacrificial rituals that generate its affective power. this is a condition of possibility of the paralysis that i think is a general ideological characteristic of this particular historical moment.
i dont think the implosion of the popular support that the bush people might at one point or another managed somehow to garner has anything to do with a large-scale rethinking of any categories on the order of nation: i think it has almost entirely to do with the simple fact that bushco. fucked up.
while i was riding, i kept thinking that a post parallel to host's above might be in order, something that outlined the contempible history of american military actions launched under false pretenses, from the enormous litany of actions carried out against native americans to the spanish-american war (remember the maine indeed) to vietnam to iraq in order to pose the question--again--of why it is that there is apparently no law that makes it criminal for the american political apparatus to launch a fucking war on false pretenses. hell, you could even put the american civil war onto that list: from a certain viewpoint a war of economic domination that legitimated itself across the call to "free the slaves"--a goal that was made as formal as is imaginable by the shabby and repellent process of "reconstruction"--a period that still---somehow--floats around outside the Glorious History of the Republic just as every other problematic aspect of the history of the united states does from the viewpoint of "civics" ideology fobbed off as accounts of the past in primary and secondary school. you know, the crock of patriotic shit that the right wants to salvage in grand old gingrich stylee and make "objective" via standardized testing. once you make this move, it is hard not to arrive at extraordinarily cynical conclusions: there is no law criminalizing wars launched under false-to-dubious pretenses because "we" appear to like them--they are good for business--and we all know that what is good for capital is good for everyone, why just look at the Glorious History of Capitalism for a demonstration.
and sometimes it seems to me that what makes the states interesting is entirely what happens DESPITE it, what goes on WITHIN AND AGAINST the dominant order in these strange spaces of cultural production that the dominant culture either co-opts or destroys (think real estate in cities)....
but maybe it's like this everywhere all the time: if the dominant political and/or cultural logics were to actually occupy the whole of the terrain, everything would collapse. there is an interesting schema for thinking about capitalist relations of production that isolates a fundamental contradiction within them--the organization of production appears to be total, but in fact it relies on its own incompleteness to function at all--it cannot acknowledge the centrality of opposition to it, but it nonetheless feeds on it. the dominant ideology of capitalism is rooted on the pretense that its extent and control is total, when it is in fact nothing of the kind; transposed onto history, it is predicated on it being taken for a natural phenomenon when it is self-evidently a historical construct and a pretty incoherent one at that.
we allow what happens to us. if we cannot imagine that another socio-political arrangement is possible, then we allow this one to continue. we make the world we live in even as we are quite sure we dont. we embody it, we repeat it, we are it. we are not bound by the past, even though we think we are. when we do nothing, we are making an ethical choice. i think that is the wrong choice. but at the same time, i understand the symbiotic relation between operating in opposition and the system itself---and sometimes it is tempting to do nothing--and sometimes i see that posting stuff here is just a way of structuring doing nothing. maybe it is. maybe it isnt. when this is interesting, it is a space for working issues out on the fly. when it isnt, it continues. sometimes i think the only reason i do this is because from time to time i can derive a bit of a therapeutic effect from dumping sentences someplace. sometimes i think that is entirely a waste of time and energy. and maybe it is. and maybe it isnt.
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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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