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rethinking
America, relocating Ourselves:
problematizing meaning in scholarship, love and life
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I accept you as you are
I believe you are valuable
I care when you hurt
I desire only what is best for you
I erase all offenses*
-Mantra
I found in Dropping Your Guard: The Value of Open Relationships
For
better or worse, we have come to a time when previously delineated boundaries
often feel artificial, where lines drawn seem to connect things more than
they divide them. Attribute it to globalization, increased individualism
because of capitalism, the raceless, genderless world that the internet
offers, or whatever cause you like, the fact remains that, for many, life
and identity exceed the perimeters of easy classification, categorization,
or compartmentalization.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in America. America, land
of the (buy one, get one) free, home of the brave (consumer). I don't
think one has to be European to see or understand American culture as
Jean Baudrillard claims in his post-modern travel narrative America (1988),
stating:
It
may be the that truth of America can only be seen by a European, since
he alone will discover here the perfect simulacrum- that of the immanence
and material transcription of all values. The Americans, for their part,
have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most
developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since
they themselves are the model(28-29).
What
one does need, however, is a perspective which is able to create or acknowledge
distance from that culture. As (in no particular order) an African-American/
Caribbean-American/ Black/ American/ (upper?) middle class/ hetero(?)sexual/
woman/ feminist/ raised in New York (Harlem)/ (mis?)educated at predominately
white institutions/ scholar/ intellectual/ singer/ writer/ dancer/ model/
artist(?), as someone who has traveled extensively abroad (Western Europe,
Latin America, Asia, the Caribbean) but has seen probably less than half
of these "united" states in America, as a person who has ties
to Protestantism, Baptism, and Buddhism, coupled with a dislike and mistrust
of organized religion, as a speaker of English, Black English, French,
Spanish and some Portuguese, my location at the intersection and on the
outside of many different discourses, genres, cultures, world views and
approaches to understanding has created a distance from America which
offers, I think, a(?) unique vantage point from which to examine it.
Sometimes this specificity feels like a prison, an intricate web in which
I am stuck, unable to locate myself. I become a patch-work of theories,
a lived and embodied contradiction. I have a relationship to my surroundings
that I want to share, but often have difficulty articulating this relationship
because it is so specific to my experiences. In her benchmark book Black
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment
(1990), Patricia Hill Collins writes, "Oppressed groups are frequently
placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas
in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group"
(xii). Sometimes it is exceedingly difficult to extract one idea from
the rest of its theoretical or discursive baggage, to verbalize and demonstrate
multiplicity and concurrence in ways that make rational, logical sense.
How can I explain, for example, to a predominately white audience how
being "Black" can be a disadvantage, but can also be an advantage?
Being Black has afforded me a connection to some incredible things- the
black church, a legacy of survival and resistance, a richness and depth
of spirit that isn't rooted in the material, a mind-blowing and diverse
artistic tradition through which I can explore and express myself, a sense
of pride and hope at the accomplishments and beauty of Black peoples from
myriad diasporic locations who have excelled and innovated in spite of
historic and present-day societal biases.
Being Black has also caused torment and tragedy for me and my family and
friends. I have experienced staggering alienation from being either the
only or one of few African-Americans in virtually every academic setting
I have encountered; yet I have also felt estranged from many of my African-American
peers in Harlem, at Hunter High School and at Amherst College because
of various markers of my class and educational background and/or my genealogy
(i.e., the way I talk and dress, the texture of my hair, my ease in interacting
with whites). I have even felt disunited from some African-Americans for
not being racist, for judging people based on the content of their character
rather than the color of their skin as Dr. Martin Luther King prescribed.
This has been a bone of contention most particularly in relation to interracial
dating, which I have defended in principle (if one wants to eliminate
racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia in society, I contend, one cannot
judge others based on race, gender, class or sexual orientation), but
have cursed at times in practice because of the way some white boyfriends
left me feeling sexualized or objectified because of their perceptions
of my race.
...Still, I have felt an overwhelming and heartwarming sense of belonging,
love and kinship based on my race- in Africa, the Caribbean and the United
States...
How do I explain my specific position and the concepts that it incites
to a predominantly white audience/ academy/ society with an awareness
of and inclusion of non-white readers in the framing of my scholarly performance,
without privileging that white audience and writing exclusively to and
for them? How do I articulate that what most would point to as the main
cause of my oppression- the color of my skin, interpreted and codified
in this society as Black or African-American- has also been the cause
of infinite joys; that I wouldn't trade it for anything? How do I then
go on to discuss the plight of the African in America or the liberation
of all peoples of African descent from oppression when I have alluded
to some of the joys and benefits that are exclusively ours and stem- at
least in part- from the many combative and coping tools that we have developed
in the face of that oppression? How do I discuss blackness (or gender,
for that matter) without essentializing? How do I strive to transcend
race and gender in my life and my scholarship without neglecting, at best,
or degrading, at worst, the historical and cultural specificity of that
race and gender, of the intersection of that race and that gender? In
other words, how do I keep it real and progressive and scholarly?
I point to race only as an example of many of the conundrums I face in
expressing myself. Each of the subheadings of my identity brings with
it a distinct problem set which I must address in order to approach the
issues and ideas that interest me. It is difficult- damn near impossible
at times- to create the scholarly performances that I would like. I stress
the performativity of my academic work because it underscores how much
of what we do in the academy is perform. I work to make sure that my textual
performances and academic performances in general are not simply compliance
with what is deemed "scholarship" by an academic hegemony.
Toward this end, I reject- and encourage other scholars to reject- the
adoption of a so-called "scholarly tone" that presents itself
as objective or neutral because it erases much of the subjectivity that
I just described, in that its performed neutrality is normally associated
with whiteness and maleness. It is from the "neutral" position
of the white male that many scholars- white and non-white, male and female-
write, forgetting that "white people are 'raced,' just as men are
'gendered'" (Frankenberg 1993, 1). These scholars often end up "other-ing"
the non-white people that they discuss, including themselves, in the process.
This performance of whiteness, whether intentional or not, fixes the non-white
subject in the realm of the oppressed and fragments the speaker into both
oppressor and oppressed. In Blood, Bread and Poetry (1984), Adrienne Rich
states: "We are not urged to help create a more human society here
in response to the ones we are taught to hate and dread. Discourse is
frozen at this level" (220). One of the reasons that discourse is
frozen might be the tone and gaze that scholars have been encouraged to
adopt, in that it ends up limiting the questions that one is able to ask.
I often question the use and usefulness of theory in approaching any of
the subheadings that most frequently comprise what is considered identity:
race, class, gender, sexuality, national origins, ethnicity, culture,
etc. It is commonly assumed that, as a student of comparative literature,
theory- literary theory most specifically- will necessarily be the springboard
and foundation of my work. I have spent the past few years trying to figure
out how I would like to interact with and relate to theory, both in my
work and in my life. I used to think that one of the benefits of theory
was that it helped me on my journey to understand myself and others. Yet
I am struck by the self-consciousness that theory evokes in me. I attribute
this, at least partially, to the fact that I have often used theory to
try to "read" myself. In doing so, I was struck by how many
of the things that I read did not jibe with my own experiences; how the
multiplicity of my own identity complicated my concurrence with one theory,
one world view, or one perception. This evoked for me the postmodern reminder
of Antonio Benitez Rojo, that "there cannot be any single truth,
but instead there are many practical and momentary ones, truths without
beginnings or ends, local truths, provisional and peremptory truths of
a pragmatic nature that barely make up a fugitive archipelago of regular
rhythms in the midst of entropy's turbulence and noise" (1992, 151).
It also made me wonder about how I am perceived, about how much of a help
theory is in bridging gaps between myself and others. I have known for
quite some time that when most people are talking about America, I am
not the one they are talking about. Essentialist thought, conflation of
categories, stereotyping, and generalizing normally leave me on the periphery
of or excluded from many discussions. I have felt marginalized by the
scholarship of white feminists or scholars of color because of the specifics
of my location.
Like a good comparatist, I have been distrustful of theories that present
themselves as a way to decipher an "other". Perhaps it is my
own position that creates in me an unwillingness to accept another human
being as an other- particularly not an exotic other, for that is the role
which I have often been relegated by teachers, peers, suitors, casting
agents, students, and the like. Or perhaps it is because of my own cosmopolitan
experiences growing up in New York City and traveling extensively that
different peoples and cultures of the world do not seem so foreign to
me. In fact, some of the most "foreign" people I have ever encountered
have been Michiganders who have never ventured more than a few "fingers"
away from their hometown, who buy American cars and have no plans to explore
this planet much farther than their legs (or their American cars) can
carry them. To me, this seems more provincial than an Indian woman working
construction in a traditional Sari or a Korean tailor's surprise at my
mother's otherworldly measurements.
My graduate career thus far has been a process of gradually accumulating
theories as ways of understanding, of attempting to gain awareness of
myself and of subjects that, in my mind, might not be so dissimilar from
myself. One of the reasons that I am in graduate school is to search for
the linguistic and analytical tools necessary for me to grasp my own and
(perhaps?) others' experience(s) of identity/identities; another is to
generate resonant scholarly performances that offer ideas as to how we
all might rethink our thinking. My scholarship is not meant to exist in
an academic vacuum, nor to comply with the academic norm of becoming so
limited in scope, specific in subject, and esoteric in knowledge that
it has little relevance to and resonance with others.
...I
have had to (and continue to!) struggle long and hard to figure out what
my own values are, why I am here, who I am, and this knowledge is- I believe-
one of the most important gifts that I can share...
My
concept of the world, of my life, of values and of the value of life has
been slowly changing over the years. Genuinely distraught over the oppression
and degradation of, among many others, peoples of color, white women,
the lower class, immigrants, homosexuals, the elderly and the disabled
in the United States, I have examined the tactics by which these groups
have inserted themselves into the academy, the media, and "American"
culture in general. Why do we/they want to continue this painful insertion
into American discourses and institutions? I have scrutinized the lives
of groups who don't see themselves as oppressed and realized that theirs
are not much better. Why do we continue to compete in a game that is not
enjoyable? Liberation will not come from white scholars quoting scholars
of color with the respect and frequency accorded their white counterparts-
the brilliant and prolific Cornel West is a testament of this. Equality,
if understood as equal inclusion and representation, will probably never
happen. The game itself must be reconfigured in order to enable other
possibilities.
This paper serves as a real, progressive, and scholarly attempt to share
some of my perceptions of American culture. Inspired by Baudrillard's
America- brought into dialogue here with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno's essay entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass
Deception"- I am interested in articulating some of the problems
I see in contemporary American society. I hope to elucidate other possibilities
for societal and/or moral configuration which might ultimately lead to
liberation.
America:
land of the lost
...there
is a violent contrast here, in this country, between the growing abstractness
of a nuclear universe and a primary, visceral, unbounded vitality, springing
not from rootedness, but from the lack of roots, a metabolic vitality,
in sex and bodies, as well as in work and in buying and selling. Deep
down, the US, with its space, its technological refinement, its bluff
good conscience, even in those spaces which it opens up for simulation,
it is the only remaining primitive society. (Baudrillard, 7, original
emphasis)
In
America, Jean Baudrillard captures an America where the scenery tells
the story of a culture. Although he asserts that "architecture should
not be humanized" (17), he uses it to tell a story that the people
do not; or, perhaps more accurately, he shows how the people that populate
this landscape a re a type of scenery as well. There are no humans who
are given subjectivity, where they do appear they are little more than
props, moveable objects that accentuate the landscape. This literary/theoretical
device accentuates Baudrillard's sad but true commentary on American lives,
which are objectified- seen in numbers, demographics, dollar signs. In
an essay entitled "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,"
wherein they discuss the effects of technology and capitalism on culture,
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno assert that "the universal criterion
of merit is the amount of 'conspicuous production,' of blatant cash investment"
(Dialect of Enlightenment, 124). In America, this idea can be applied
to products of culture (movies, for instance, where the amount spent on
making the movie is meant to indicate its merit to moviegoers, and its
gross at the box office is intended to indicate its value as art), as
well as people as products of culture (the amount spent on one's education,
for instance, coded in the name-brand of the school, is meant to indicate
one's merit to prospective employers, and one's salary is seen as an indication
of one's worth to their company).
How did we get to this point where lives could be appraised, where we
can get an estimate on our self-worth by plugging some numbers (SAT scores,
GPA's, net worth, zip code, age, weight, clothing size) into some arbitrary
and unarticulated formula? Is merit or success numerical? Do these numbers
give meaning to life? Horkheimer and Adorno claim that they do give a
certain meaning, in that they help group people into markets. "Everybody
must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined
and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out
for his type" (123). I mean, who wants to be the one who didn't see
that "must-see" movie that everyone is discussing at the dinner
party/ conference/ union meeting? Our number helps determine what type
of consumer we will be and- with our purchases laid out tastefully around
us- what type of lives we will lead.
This whole numbers game is symptomatic of the (false) myth of America
as a meritocracy; it is also indicative of the confusing and often contradictory
rhetoric of conformity and individualism which pervades American thought.
Everyone (secretly) wants to be a moviestar, a rockstar, a sportstar,
in whatever their field of work. Everyone wants to stand out as better
than others- to not have to be a team player. Everyone wants to reach
a point where non-conformity has the fewest repercussions, where we need
no one (or, at least, very few), but we are needed by many, seen as indispensable.
Or, as they said in the film Easy Rider, "Everybody wants to be free."
Horkheimer and Adorno quote Alexis de Tocqueville to demonstrate this
as part of the (false) myth of freedom in our culture. "Under the
private culture monopoly it is a fact that 'tyranny leaves the body free
and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: You must
think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your
life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day
on you are a stranger among us'" (133). Don't we all kinda want to
be this stranger, but be loved by the masses for it- like moviestars,
like rockstars? Aren't we all on the inside, wishing desperately, secretly,
to be the idealized outsider (because this type of outsider is always
circled and enclosed by American culture, making their location on the
outside into the innermost one- the hole in the donut that isn't just
air because of the donut surrounding it, differentiating it from the bland,
limitless air that is on the outside of the donut), just once?
But what to make of this freedom- is it freedom from anonymity? To be
anonymous in America today is to be powerless, voiceless, trapped. So
why conform if one's true (hidden) goal to be peerless, groupless, representative
only of oneself? Is this why we strive to be better, in order to merit
estranging ourselves and be, finally, free? Why does our society privilege
conformity, then challenge us to stand out while still conforming?
I think this might be a repercussion of the "death of the subject,"
the end of individualism that is associated with post-modernism. In "Postmodernism
and Consumer Society," published in 1983 in Hal Foster's volume The
Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, Frederic Jameson discusses
the shift from a modernist conceptualization of the individual to a postmodern
one:
The
great modernisms were, as we have said, predicated on the invention of
a personal, private style, as unmistakable as your fingerprint, as incomparable
as your own body. But this means that the modernist aesthetic is in some
way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private
identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected
to generate its own unique vision of the world and to forge its own unique,
unmistakable style.
Yet today, from any number of distinct perspectives, the social theorists,
the psychoanalysts, even the linguists, not to speak of those of us who
work in the area of culture and cultural and formal change, are all exploring
the notion that that kind of individualism and personal identity is a
thing of the past; that the old individual or individualist subject is
"dead"; and that one might even describe the concept of the
unique individual and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological.
(114-5)
Many Americans are stuck between modernism and postmodernism, it seems.
We want to be individuals at the very moment that we realize its impossibility,
exploring the limited number of combinations and permutations of what
is seen as acceptable within these cultural confines. Our consumption
becomes a method of differentiation, a key component in our identity.
Work becomes a necessary evil for sustaining one's lifestyle, money becomes
the vehicle through which one may construct an image. All the technological
toys, the power, the beauty products, the designer excess, all of it is
meant to give one the appearance of eternal youth, understood through
our cultural lens as being universally physically appealing, of being
without responsibility to any other human beings, of at least projecting
a convincing aura of freedom. American lives are lived as races against
time- as an eternal present- because of a cultural unwillingness to come
to terms with death.
Life, however mundane and identical, is seen as belonging to the individual.
My walkman/ car stereo/ home stereo blasts the soundtrack of my life at
me, the city/ town/ countryside forms the background for the unfolding
of my drama, my reflection in the store windows/ the sideview mirror/
my lover's eyes confirming my suspicion that it really is all about me,
isn't it? Nevermind that I have no idea what I'm about... People unite
in our culture to indicate class affiliation, status; common places become
spas, gyms, parties, grocery store, certain subway stops, restaurants,
bars- all of which shine their status and their youth through the types
of products and services they offer. People unite so that the people surrounding
them can confirm it really is all about me, isn't it?
Baudrillard's America is full of simulacra and devoid of meaning. He writes:
America
is neither dream nor reality. It is a hyperreality. It is a hyperreality
because it is a utopia which has behaved from the very beginning as though
it were already achieved. Everything here is real and pragmatic, and yet
is all the stuff of dreams too.
One
of the reasons for the hyperreality that Baudrillard describes is the
blurring of boundaries that I described earlier. One of the most troublesome
blurrings is that of the line between mass media and real life, fiction
and reality. Horkheimer and Adorno say that "real life is becoming
indistinguishable from the movies" (126); Baudrillard claims that
"in America cinema is true because it is the whole of space, the
whole way of life that are cinematic. The break between the two, the abstraction
which we deplore, does not exist: life is cinema" (101). Americans
want to solve all their problems, save the day, get the girl/boy, and
be the casual, affable, lovable center of attention- just like the plastic
stars of the formulaic movies they know and lovingly, unquestioningly
consume. This should not be construed as narcissism, according to Baudrillard.
"What develops around the video or stereo culture is not a narcissistic
imaginary, but an effect of frantic self-referentiality, a short circuit
which immediately hooks up like with like, and, in so doing, emphasizes
their surface intensity and deeper meaninglessness" (37).
Baudrillard sees television as " a video of another world, ultimately
addressed to no one at all, delivering its messages indifferently, indifferent
to its own messages" (50). Yet I also see how television is a social
instructor, how human relationships are modeled after what one sees on
television. Children and adolescents are taught how to do math, memorize,
and make perfunctory use of logic and metanarrative in school, but they
are taught how to fashion their social relationships by television, movies,
and music. Television is indifferent to its own message, but by this I
mean that it is indifferent to its instructional role in this culture.
It is "addressed to no one" in that it is unwilling to accept
this role and take some sort of responsibility for what it transmits.
Today I saw Britney Spears on MTV watching fans comment on her sexy manner
of dress. Many of them felt that she should be more aware of the young,
impressionable teens and preteens that comprise much of her fan base;
to which she responded that she is not the parent of these kids and should
not be responsible for their development. Morality on television is simply
another market for another demographic which, Spears seemed to be saying,
was not her department.
I think Baudrillard is dead on in his assessment of the primitivism and
poeticized poverty of spirit in America. I have considered American society
a sick society for a long time, and one that makes me sick. I am disgusted
at statistics regarding obesity and eating disorders in this country,
repulsed by the paper thin models and starved celebrities that are held
up as some sort of paragon of beauty. I am sickened by the means that
these people use to attain these bodies, many absurd, compulsive, destructive,
even deadly. People strive to buy bodies the way one might buy a car (i.e.
certain gyms are used by certain celebrities which intimates that it produces
certain bodies, interpreted and appreciated through a lens which codes
that type of body as a successful representation of its status- the pliant,
angular model, the buff, gay Adonis, the slim, moody fop). We want to
be individuals at the same moment that we want others not to be, because
we don't want to think of anything as unattainable- Britney Spears is
not unique, her physique can be mine... if the price is right!
I am dismayed by the lack of meaning and purpose in the lives of my fellow
Americans. Students that I taught last year told me that their goal is
to retire at 35 and spend the rest of their lives doing "whatever."
They want a wife and kids, eventually, only because they are part of the
packaged dream deal. I am frightened that they have no sense of obligation
to anyone- their community, their country, their generation, their god.
They will be content to compensate their parents for their time and money
spent raising them by buying them a Mercedes, a condo, a Rolex, and visiting
them once a year at the holidays to continue the familial material exchange.
I am depressed that "I shop, therefore I am" is more self evident
these days than the Cartesian logic it parodies. Americans consume indescriminately,
putting everything from meat to candy to chemicals to pens to our own
hair in our mouths. We buy indescriminately, thinking we are entitled
to anything that we can swipe a card to purchase. Imagine- we as a nation
are so obsessed with consumption that one of our largest industries is
diet and health-related products- we consume things that are supposed
to either block or inhibit or negate our consumption! Americans are so
far removed from the production of the goods that we consume that it is
virtually impossible to have a genuine morality, to instill in that consumption
some type of meaning.
I am alarmed that people still think that happiness can be bought, that
children would rather have material things than present parents; that
many parents see their child on their screensaver at work more than they
see her or him in real life. They say that they just want their kids to
have what they never got as children, but forget that what they wanted
most was love, attention, and nurturing. Cornel West and Sylvia Ann Hewlett
acknowledge the difficulty of raising children "in our materialistic,
individualistic age" (333) in their book The War against Parents
(1998), pointing to the enormous investment of parents in raising a child
to age 18- in the range of $145,000 (333)- and the way that these costs
infringe on the possibility of spending time with one's children, as well
as- more importantly- the way that society's message of individualism
thwart parents' desire to do so.
Contemporary
moms and dads are trapped between the escalating requirements of their
children, who need more resources (in terms of both time and money) for
longer periods of time than ever before, and the signals of a culture
that is increasingly scornful of effort expended on others. Parents often
feel as though they are expected to read from two or three different scripts
that diverge completely in terms of how they lead their lives. Should
they take on a second job to pay for college, or should they stay home
in the evening to do a little bonding and turn off the TV? Or should they
do neither of the above, but instead work two jobs and spend the extra
income on health-club membership? Life is short, and paying at least some
attention to oneself is a good idea. Besides, a trimmer figure might make
all the difference in the next round of promotions. It is easy for a bewildered
parent to become paralyzed as he or she is beseiged by a host of contradictory
demands. (334)
While parents are busy figuring out their priorities, or not, kids start
experimenting with sex, drugs, and rebellion against authority several
years earlier than previous generations, abbreviating their childhoods,
limiting their possibilities, even shortening their lives. Children seeking
structure, values, discipline, and love- which "provides the basis
for self-love and self-esteem" (338) according to West and Hewlett-
are given instead a new Sony Playstation game, a Christina Aguilera CD,
Ritalin, therapy, privacy. It is little wonder that the following staggering
statistics about children exist:
o
The homicide rate for children aged fourteen to seventeen has risen 172
percent since 1985.
o The use of illicit drugs among high-school seniors is up 44 percent
since 1992.
o SAT scores have slipped 27 points since the early 1970s.
o The rate of suicide among black teenagers has more than tripled since
1980.
o Obesity among children aged twelve to seventeen has doubled since 1970.
(statistics qtd. in West & Hewlett, 340)
What we have lost touch with, as a culture, is even the most remote understanding
of what we need. We might know what we want- rattling off a Christmas
list and a grocery list and a wish list of items- but we have no idea
what we need. Need requires an awareness of oneself; need is obscured
until we remove the seven deadly sins from an individual, from a culture.
I am frightened by Baudrillard's construction of America as any type of
utopia, whether "no place" or "a good place," but
can see how it could be construed as a modern utopia, the prototype of
the modernity/modernization project- a historyless barrage of signifiers
and messages, all centering around the mighty dollar which has self-realized
into the "God" in whom "we trust;" lives lived in
reverse once one hits 23, ever trying to regress back into the mother's
womb, to be lives lived without history.
What I take from Baudrillard is an accurate lens through which one might
mediate the cultural messages, myths and morés. It requires stepping
back and seeing through a more inclusive lens, seeing a bigger picture
so to speak. His exteriority to American culture makes him regard America
as a fascinating freak show, valuable because of its meaninglessness.
We
fanatics of aesthetics and meaning, of culture, of flavor and seduction,
we who see only what is profoundly moral as beautiful and for whom only
the heroic distinction between nature and culture is exciting, we who
are unfailingly attached to the wonders of critical sense and transcendence
find it a mental shock and a unique release to discover the fascination
of nonsense and of this vertiginous disconnection, as sovereign in the
cities as in the deserts. To discover that one can exult in the liquidation
of all culture and rejoice in the consecration of in-difference (Baudrillard,
123).
My exteriority to American culture, married to my investment in it, instill
in me a desire to do something to stop or thwart this self-perpetuating,
self-proliferating, self-serving, meaningless ideology that is more widespread
and more debilitating than cancer, HIV, the flu, or the common cold. It
causes not only deaths, but dead lives, lives that race on toward, flirt
with, beckon, and sometimes long for death- lives not worth living. Baudrillard
states plainly, "This country is without hope" (123). I think
that meaning is what is missing from many lives in America; that this
country is without meaning... and direction... and dignity. "Dignity
is as compelling a human need as food or sex, and yet here is a society
which casts the mass of its people in limbo, never satisfying their hunger
for dignity, nor yet so explicitly depriving them that the task of proving
dignity seems an unreasonable burden, and revolt against the society the
only reasonable alternative" (Sennett & Cobb, 191). But we have
to have hope; without hope we fall into the nihilism that Cornel West
defines in Race Matters (1993):
Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there
are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is,
far more, the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaning-lessness,
hopelessness and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result
is a numbing detachment from others and a self-destructive disposition
toward the world. Life without meaning, hope and love breeds a cold-hearted,
mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others (page?).
I have and plan to impart hope and possible meanings and possible directions
that we might adopt and pursue as individuals, communitites, and a society
so that we might live differently, fully, responsibly, with love, dignity,
spirituality, acceptance, community and peace at the forefront of our
existences. Since that's a helluva lot to accomplish in one twenty page
paper, I will start here, now, with you, reader, explaining some of my
core beliefs and how they have shaped my life's work, my love life and
my scholarship.
My
life's work
In an essay entitled "The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity,"
bell hooks asks, "How do we create an oppositional worldview, a consciousness,
an identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which
also opposes dehumanization but as a that movement which enables creative,
expansive self-actualization? Opposition is not enough. In that vacant
space after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become- to
make oneself anew" (hooks, 15). But while hooks criticizes previous
historical actions and movements of progressive radical blacks, I see
them as necessary- if misguided- steps leading to the present day. Rather
than focus on the patriarchal values that were appropriated by African-Americans
in earlier struggles, I would like to focus on the values that I would
like to see any and all progressive movements strive to achieve.
What
the world needs now is... well, love sweet love, as the song goes. What
I mean by this is that if the world is indeed postmodern, a collage of
micronarratives, then we need to strive toward something in between micro
and meta narratives, between the local and the universal, but which takes
into account still existing metanarratives (i.e. progress, whatever metanarratives
make capitalist materialism seem like a good thing) and works to mediate,
modify, and mollify these myths. I am a tad too utopic in life, love,
and scholarship, but I feel that now is the time where we can say, in
small groups, "okay, if nothing is true, what would we like to be
true? What types of things promote the values that are most dear to me,
peace, for example?" and agree on what values and beliefs we want
to have underscore our general (not local, not universal) narratives.
One of my main goals in life is to build a community/commune of people
who share similar beliefs and disbeliefs as me (that capitalism has created
a sick society; that meaning can and must be inscribed in life, not through
material things or a self-centered existence, but through lived interactions
and the collapse of belief and practice, whereby they become one entity)
and create with them an environment in which those beliefs govern our
actions and interactions. Examining this goal in terms of narratives,
I think that what I want to have happen is to create an environment, a
form of education, and a way of interacting with culture (in this case
to be the arts and the media, but also the micro & metanarratives
that govern other people's lives) that promote, support, and legitimize
an agreed upon world view. I guess this means, to a certain extent, censorship
of certain narratives, as well as a reinterpretation of others so that
they can be accepted as the viewpoints of others, but not ones that need
to affect one's own world view.
My community will be interested in working to produce goods to fulfill
our needs instead of working to earn money to buy goods. One of the things
this is meant to do is restore meaning. I see American lives as, for the
most part, meaningless lives dedicated to building monuments of nothingness
and bridges to nowhere. I blame this meaninglessness for much of what
Beaudrillard describes. Lives lived without purpose, racing on toward
death. By making things- clothes, food, etc.- we would hope to have a
deeper understanding of what those things are by reestablishing a connection
with the process involved in their creation.
WORKS
CITED
Baudrillard, Jean (Chris Turner, transl.). 1988. America. New York: Verso.
Benitez Rojo, Antonio. 1992. The Repeating Island : The Caribbean and
the Postmodern Perspective (Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1991. Black Feminist Thought:Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.
Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction
of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston:
South End Press.
Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (John Cumming, transl.). Dialectic
of Enlightenment. New York: Seabury Press.
Jameson, Frederic. 1982. "Postmodernism and Consumer Society."
In The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster.
111-125. Port Townsend: Bay Press.
Rich, Adrienne. 1984. "Notes Toward a Politics of Location."
In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985. New York: W.W.
Norton & Co.
West, Cornel. 1999. The Cornel West Reader. New York: Basic Civitas Books.
----------------. 1993. Race Matters. Boston: Beacon Press.
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