It would appear that misunderstanding the attempt to overcome misunderstanding has, as one of of the very obstacles to be overcome, produced misunderstanding. Consequently, it's become startlingly clear to me after writing the last three posts, that a more programmatic statement is necessary before I continue. In the comments section of post III of this series is wrote the following:
Maybe I should have called it Re-Thinking America, because what is ultimately at fault in the Misunderstandings that I'm dealing with are unacknowledged and uncritically assumed presuppositions which frame the debate in such a way that the more fundamental phenomenon of America is lost by closing down avenues for inquiry.
I think, Scott, that it's time for all of us re-examine our beliefs, so that we approach the 21st century with a robust, vibrant set of ideas that are not uncritically beholden to earlier doxa. We need to articulate new criteria to judge who we are and where we are going, and not just "willy-nilly" recycle obsolete mythology. Because, if you're right, and America is currently in a war of ideas with other cultures, we need to know what the measure of America really is other than "Apple Pie".
To which I'd like to add the following:
America, as a phenomenon, is of the few universals in this world.
This is to not to say that America is universally valid like a scientific law, rather, America as a phenomenon touches the lives of nearly every person in the world -- kinda like death and taxes. As such, experience of that phenomenon constitutes the most widely shared experience in the world, hence "universal". Which means that not only is what America means at issue for all of humanity, but that every single human, citizen and non-citizen alike, have opinions on America.
This poses a rather interesting methodological problem. First, such an exploration of this "universal" could not an inductive movement from differentiated, concrete particularity to undifferentiated, abstract universality, wherein the former is an example of the latter. What is America an example of if not itself? What is its prototype? Second, and closely related, is a question of the inadequacy of typology to provide us with any more understanding than induction. How would we group America with other similar phenomena? To what genus does the species America belong? Bearing in mind that we would have to develop criteria by which to classify such a thing -- is not the very act of classification bear with it a multitude of unquestioned values and assumptions along with it? For example, if we said that America was a democracy, wouldn't we either develop a classification system based around various assumptions of America as an organizing principle, or define America with recourse to a pre-defined set of attributes, based on a criteria that is arbitrarily assigned prior to any empirical observation of America? And, getting down to it, aren't these really the same thing -- developing a organizational schema based on a limited number of factors which necessarily prejudice any result of the inquiry? Which is to say, when we chose our starting point, we have already chosen our finishing point.
Third, we must take care not to arbitrarily dismiss the various and sundry perspectives of America (possibly 6 billion) because there are countless interpretations possible in an observation of America. This is not to say that all perspectives are valid -- not at all -- what it does suggest is that we must consider the legitimacy of a perspective, and do that with an open, yet critical mind. And, when choosing to advance an interpretation, we must back that choice up, providing the measure of our thinking. This means that, ultimately, the interpretations that we settle on will be necessarily be meta-interpretations -- claims that explain how the great number and disparity of perspectives on America arise, or are possible at all. Consequently, these claims will necessarily be ambivalent, abstract, and somewhat contradictory.
Fourth, and this point cannot be overdrawn, we must resist the urge to reduce the American phenomenon to a neat summation. The very scope and multiplicity of particularity of America renders such a move hopelessly naive and unproductive; e.g. "the only constant is change." While a valid truism, how can we develop any understanding from such a statement? Isn't this really a surrender of sorts -- a resignation to ignorance? This problem gains an added level of complexity once we accept that both foreigners and Americans are susceptible to Misunderstanding America. For many Americans, America might be "the Home of the Free and the Land of the Brave", but to many foreigners, it is a land of corruption, weakness, decadence, and greed that constantly subverts their nation's political processes (violently or peaceably). It is not enough to attribute the two wildly diverging attitudes to chauvinism or cultural misconceptions -- as both answers are content to explain differences in terms of subjectivity and take our investigation away from what we are really after, namely, America.
And fifth, it is my contention that many of the problems in issues 3 and 4 are due to a lack of exposure to America within the American political boundaries or a to seeing how the phenomenon of America has successfully penetrated all but the most isolated of communities in the world. I do not intend to denote something "narrow-minded-ness" or some other descriptive condescension. Exposure to the world, on a basic -- almost banal -- level is fundamental to all human beings, and many of the observations that are necessary to produce this kind of diagnosis require nothing more than one travel to other places and witness, first-hand, the phenomenon of America on the outside or the inside, whatever the case may be. Here is also where I contend that my experience living half of my life in the Developing World and half of it in America is so important: because I've been fortunate enough to experience America externally and internally, I'm uniquely suited to undertake this analysis. Yeah, it's an intellectual conceit -- a narcissisme -- but all human projects are grounded in the human. This simple insight is why the sciences, in spite of all of their discoveries, remain naive disciplines: science cannot scientifically account for the communal activity scientists doing science. Just what is the mathematical formula, the chemical composition, or the atomic weight of scientific theories (no really, the actual knowledge); can you exposit with complete, verifiable and repeatable certainty the exact process that generates scientific knowledge? No. Well, then, if we can't even get to "objectivity" in the "objective sciences", how can you expect me to aspire to such tomfoolery?
Or, as Nietzsche articulates in The Gay Science, #374.
How far the perspective character of existence extends or indeed whether existence has any other character than this; whether existence without interpretation, without "sense," does not become "nonsense," whether, on the other hand, all existence is not essentially actively engaged in interpretation—that cannot be decided even by the most industrious and most scrupulously conscientious analysis and self-examination of the intellect: for in the course of this analysis the human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these.
And another thing: this is not a post-modern analysis of the world that sees everything solely in terms of power relationships and the knowledge which configures them. Here the too-often mistake of such thinkers is to reduce (or reconstruct) the world to such relationships. There is no denying that much of how the world has come to be and endured is the result of the perpetuation of power relationships. But that also reduces the legitimacy of a claim to the politics of its presenter.
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of speaking with my cousin and her husband, both academics with a background in history. When they revealed to me that one of their colleagues was teaching a course on the post-WWII 20th Century by presenting Pearl Harbor as nothing more than a racist and destructive "gender construct" that never happened and was subsequently used to justify the United States engaging in atomic warfare I was shocked! They were dismissive of the idea, but I was not. That's because yes, it is a power-based "gender-construct" used to justify dropping the Bomb, but Pearl Harbor did happen, just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki did happen. To reduce these historical events to what they signified only vis-a-vis American hegemonic power fundamentally (and willfully) misunderstands the situation. It is unfortunate that such prejudicial analysis passes for scholarship today.
The preceding points I laid out have been to show how problematic this project is if we choose to remain faithful to the meta-phenomenon of America as market / polity / community / society / spectacle / technology. We could always provide a crude understanding of the world, similar to denying the bombing of Pearl Harbor to make a point. This is not our intent. A thorough exposition of America must subtly remain faithful to the phenomenon's facticity, ideality, linguisticality, and empirical actuality (née reality).
Having so framed the problem, perhaps we can renew our investigation in the near future.
