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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, July 01, 2003
Eric Hobsbawm has an interesting piece on the condition of modern US society; a better title might perhaps be 'After De Tocqueville.' Accordingly, much of it is as we might expect; observing that the US is not an intimate acquaintance of change, with an embalmed constitution that ensures political stablity by denying any instrument of powerful decision making through the checks and balances system and accordingly runs afoul of events unforeseen in the constitution or the decline of egalitarianism in favour of individualism. However, one theme did stand out, presented through excerpts below:"It substituted the question "In its national ideology the U.S.A. does not simply exist. It only achieves. It has no collective identity except as the best, the greatest country, superior to all others and the acknowledged model for the world... The question that preoccupies so many American historians of their own country, namely, "What does it mean to be American?," is one that rarely bothered my generation of historians in European countries... Nobody in Europe had set out to write "the great English novel" or "the great French novel," but authors in the United States still try their hand ... at "the great American novel," ... Where else except America could an oeuvre like Andy Warhol's have come into being, an enormously ambitious and specific, unending set of variations on the themes of living in the U.S.A., from its soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles to its mythologies, dreams, nightmares, heroes, and heroines? There is nothing like it in the visual-arts tradition of the old world "
It's an interesting critique, if only because it runs so contrary to so many previous discussions, which have traditionally dwelt on the imposition of American identity elsewhere in the world (a point Hobsbawm does not accept); one thinks of the efforts of the Academie Francaise to curtail American influence on French culture, by restricting the prevalence of US loan words and American music. Certainly, the United States has had enormous success in mythologising itself through popular media. Values are propagated non-verbally, through a process of being steeped in visual media.
As Neal Stephenson's essay In the Beginning There was the Command Line puts it "the basic tenet (of contemporary visual media)... is that people need to stop judging each other-to stop asserting (and, eventually, to stop believing) that this is right and that is wrong, this true and that false, one thing ugly and another thing beautiful, in order for a large number of different cultures to coexist it is necessary for people to suspend judgment in this way. " To Stephenson, this is the root of the hostility towards all concepts of authority in popular culture; all authority figures become buffoons and "hip-jaded coolness" is the only place to be.
Conversely, JG Ballard in Hello America, dwelt on the pre-occupation with the metempsychosis of the self; from the pre-occupation of the Pilgrim Fathers with the salvation of the soul to the altogether more modern pre-occupation with cosmetic surgery and psychiatry; "the United States had based itself on this proposition that everyone should be able to live out his furthest fantasies, wherever they might lead, explore every opportunity, however bizarre" (conveniently this happens to be the main theme of all of Ballard's novels).Labels: History
posted by Richard 9:12 pm
