Elsewhere in America

The Crisis of Belonging in Contemporary Culture

David Trend

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317225423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

Americans think of their country as a welcoming place where everyone has equal opportunity. Yet historical baggage and anxious times can restrain these possibilities. Newcomers often find that civic belonging comes with strings attached––riddled with limitations or legally punitive rites of passage. For those already here, new challenges to civic belonging emerge on the basis of belief, behavior, or heritage. This book uses the term "elsewhere" in describing conditions that exile so many citizens to "some other place" through prejudice, competition, or discordant belief. Yet, in another way, "elsewhere" evokes an undefined "not yet" ripe with potential. In the face of America's daunting challenges, can "elsewhere" point to optimism, hope, and common purpose?

Through 12 detailed chapters, the book applies critical theory in the humanities and social sciences to examine recurring crises of social inclusion in the U.S. After two centuries of incremental "progress" in securing human dignity, today the U.S. finds itself torn by new conflicts over reproductive rights, immigration, health care, religious extremism, sexual orientation, mental illness, and fear of terrorists. Is there a way of explaining this recurring tendency of Americans to turn against each other? Elsewhere in America engages these questions, charting the ever-changing faces of difference (manifest in contested landscapes of sex and race to such areas as disability and mental health), their spectral and intersectional character (recent discourses on performativity, normativity, and queer theory), and the grounds on which categories are manifest in ideation and movement politics (metapolitics, cosmopolitanism, dismodernism).

Part I

Belonging There

People like Us

Nations are defined by the stories they tell about themselves, as well as the ways others see them. Part I: “Belonging There: People like Us” examines some of America’s national stories, as their generalities often unravel in the contemporary United States. In principle, such broad narratives are seen as holding national societies together, giving them a sense of unity, common history, and singular purpose. But there is a problem. While the idea of a unifying story may have worked in some early tribal societies, the complexities of modern nation states frustrate narrative reduction (which itself has epistemological limitations), thus producing forms of civic tension in contemporary America. This section’s title, “Belonging There,” evokes the certainty with which some parties locate themselves with like-minded compatriots—“belonging” in neighborhoods, political parties, interest groups, or online communities.

Individual chapters in this section specify ways that broad categories of national belonging are undermined by discordant attitudes toward the economy, faith, normalcy, and security. Tensions between general and specific perspectives work against the ideal of perfect consensus in most modern nations, as does the self-limiting character of any single story. Conflicts inevitably result, as divergent opinions compete with nationalistic yearnings for wholeness and belonging. As Homi K. Bhabha wrote two decades ago in Nation and Narration, often these tensions become manifest in disagreements over the national “story” itself, which is doomed to an endless lack of closure. While these contests generate certain forms of discomfort, their dynamism also can produce moments of possibility. Bhabha writes that if the struggle for closure “questions the ‘totalization’ of national culture, then its positive value lies in displaying the wide dissemination through which we construct fields of meaning and symbols associated with national life.”¹

As a country with a relatively brief history, the United States hungers for a belonging mythology—with disparate interests vying for its authorship. Myths are more than simple stories. Whether representing tradition or ideology, mythology provides a connotative structure for social meanings manifest inside and outside of “language” per se. This is why certain myths are hard to contain, as Roland Barthes famously pointed out in his 1957 book Mythologies.² Myths of masculinity don’t only come into use through classical tales of heroism, but also through the prosaic rituals of sports culture, militarism, and school bullying, for example. In common parlance today, a “myth” is widely understood to be a familiar belief that is false, such as the myth that money always brings happiness. As in advertising, such beliefs may not be true in a literal sense, but they often appeal to unconscious desires. This is what led Barthes to conclude that myths often function politically on some level, with this process unfolding in a most insidious way. On the surface myths appear to be transparent, “hiding nothing” even as they convey distortions. But at a deeper level, “myth transforms history into nature,” Barthes observed, making its meanings seem as though they were always there. And of course many people do indeed subscribe to myths. This is where the obfuscations of myth become dangerous, with its ideations regarded “not as a motive, but as reason.”³ The naturalization of myth obscures its intentionality and ideology, creating the illusion that it is neutral and depoliticized.

Myth’s sleight of hand can become especially potent when attached to notions of origins, authenticity, and other ideals of nationalist belonging. Keep in mind that America started out mired in contradictions—between public and private interests, between state and national governance—not to mention the divisions between separatists and loyalists, which persisted well past colonial times. The halcyon days of revolutionary unity always have been a convenient trope. In more practical terms, the term “United States of America” is better seen as a coalition of opposition, predicated upon a “new” egalitarian horizontality rather than an “old” aristocratic verticality. In this way, this purportedly “reasoned” revolutionary impulse in many ways replicated its “idealized” precursor in philosophical terms. Yet U.S. democracy always was more of a dream than a reality, even as particularized in constitutional and representative terms. This temporal slippage became glaringly obvious with the elision of the name United States of America to the nickname “America”—a term later recognized throughout the world as a synonym for U.S. imperialism.

Old habits die hard. If one looks at the current state of belonging and not belonging in the United States, there is plenty of repetition, denial, and repressed memory to inform the inquiry. Despite its enormous wealth and military might, the United States lumbers its way through the 21st century with a pervasive sense of insecurity—always worrying about external enemies or internal subversives. Some say this is a symptom of decline or a nagging fear of impending loss. Regardless of its origins, the U.S. counters its insecurities with grand assertions of power and ethical purpose—of the nation’s unique role in history and global affairs. This is the mythology of “American exceptionalism”, a tale of a heroic nation with a unique role in global affairs and human history. The problem is that any long view of civilization shows that this American mythology is far from exceptional. It’s the same story great empires have told themselves throughout time. But as a relatively new empire the U.S. has less experience with historical memory, and if you haven’t noticed, arguments over American history undergird many of the nation’s recent cultural conflicts—with one side or another claiming a privileged access to the “truth” about founding principles, citizenship, marriage, and so on.

Behind this selective memory is a particular pathology that, while not unique to the U.S., assumes a certain potency given the nation’s age and origins. If recent history teaches one anything, it shows a repeating cycle of unity and division, inclusion and exclusion, security and worry—in other words a continual return to certain narratives of desire and fear—from which the country seems unable to escape. The U.S. shares with other immigrant nations a longing for a sense of origins or home—a longing often twinged with nostalgic imaginings. But America still struggles with coming to terms with these yearnings. This may partly explain why a figure like Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly chooses to look back only a decade or so to proclaim “the end of America as we know it” in his tirades about immigration and marriage equality.⁴

Another overarching conceit of these appeals to mythical idealism lies in their claim to exceed partisan politics or disputes over values. Presumably, it is argued, there is something “united” about the states of America. Like most mythic constructions, this story is instructive for its elisions and repressed elements. Settlers arriving in the U.S. from all parts of the world carried with them the residue of former ways of life (consciously or unconsciously). Prior hierarchical habits often proved very difficult to set aside. Perhaps most significantly, transition to the new world was often marked by trauma. Remember that huge numbers of early immigrants left their homelands under duress, with many dying in transit or entering lives of servitude upon arrival. Then the brutality of settling the new land began—with a genocidal program to exterminate indigenous populations. Next came a violent revolution, decades of internal conflict, a massive slave trade, battles over borders and land, the Civil War, and the horrific military conflagrations of the 20th century.

Much more is understood today than ever before about the intergenerational character of suffering and loss. But little has been written into common accounts of American history of the grief, depression, confusion, distrust, denial, guilt, anger, and revenge impulses buried in the collective American psyche. Again and again, the U.S. seems to relive such repressed memory as contemporary experience. Images from the past resurface into the present, attaching themselves to a changing array of heroes and villains at home and abroad. This failure to find closure means that the object is always deferred—and never actually found. What remains is a continual search for truth, manifest in an anxious struggle for meaning.

Notes

1 Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation,” Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 3.

2 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1972).

3 Mythologies, p. 128

4 Bill O’Reilly, “Fox News Election Coverage,” (Nov. 6, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peiANkiO1qQ (accessed May 5, 2014).

1

Makers-and-Takers

When More Is Not Enough

To most middle-class Americans, a yearly income of $400,000 probably sounds like pretty good money. It’s nearly eight times the average family income and surely a fantasy for the 50 million Americans living in poverty. But hold on a minute. According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s practically impossible to scrape by with such a six-figure income. “You’re just breaking even,” explained WSJ Wealth Advisor Veronica Dagher in a video segment on the journal’s website. What with vacations, the country club, and the mortgage on that $1.2 million house—not to mention those pesky taxes on income, property, and purchases—high earners “feel like they are just nearly getting by.”¹ Under such financial duress, is it any wonder that publications like the WSJ report that the nation’s upper class increasingly feels under assault?

Obviously these sentiments are striking at a number of levels, and illustrative of America’s twisted thinking about wealth and poverty. In historical terms, the country has promoted itself as a land of freedom and opportunity, where people rise and fall on their own merits. Yet within this thinking a certain normative logic has tended to hold sway, with too much or too little money seen as undesirable. The mythical figure of the “Average American” persists in the country’s infatuation with its celebrated middle class. But now these once-balanced sentiments are getting more ideologically charged. Despite the banking scandals of the early 2000s, conservatives again insist that wealth should be seen as virtue in its own right in a “post-civil rights” era. Even liberals are beginning to reconsider previous approaches to income redistribution and government assistance. Ironically these shifts are paralleling a shrinkage of the American middle class in every state in America.² While the gap between the haves and the have-nots is no secret, statisticians see such stratification intensifying even as the recession of the early 2000s winds down.

Still, it’s the attitudinal hardening that is so striking—a growing disregard for those left behind in a winner-takes-all America. Explanations abound for this shift: lingering bias and structural inequality; rising tides of competitive individualism; a loss of connection and community concern; and a decline in faith and altruism are often cited. Sociologists have long written of commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, and other performances of class status in societies that place high premiums on upward mobility. But in more immediate terms, the recent recession brought money worries to most American families, even wealthy ones. Beset by feelings of insecurity, many yearn for reason and certainty as they anticipate the future. And so has returned the Darwinian figure of the “undeserving poor” as a concept that justifies affluence while obfuscating more difficult questions.³ Some even say that the wealthy assuage their guilt with beliefs that poor people bring hardship on themselves.

In this context, the expression “makers-and-takers” has entered popular discourse as a form of shorthand for conflicting economic philosophies. Famously revealed in billionaire Mitt Romney’s quip about America’s “47 percent,” makers and takers describes a nation divided into two classes: one of producers, the other of parasites. As the U.S. still struggles with recessionary aftereffects, this dichotomy continues to resonate with voters, rhetorically drawing a line between a class of autonomous “job creators, entrepreneurs, and innovators” and others “dependent on government, who believe they are victims.”⁴ Romney’s divisive populism played well in conservative circles, as it collapsed a swath of issues into familiar tropes of success and failure. Hinging on the premise that values emerge from economic relationships, a similar ontology (somewhat ironically) defined Marx’s dialectical materialism.⁵

Credit for the capitalist version of this philosophy often goes to Ayn Rand, specifically as espoused in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. The book depicts a dystopian America in which the titans of industry have their successes crushed by government regulators—and consequently “shrug” off their ambitions and dreams. Rand termed her metaphoric anticommunism “moral objectivism”—setting forth an absolutist agenda of “rational self-interest” and acquisitive impulses as sacred values. These ideas played well in the Cold War era by pitting individual “freedom” against collectivist “tyranny.” As she put it, “No rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality—to think, to work and to keep the results—which means: the right of property.”⁶ Rand disciples would argue that society should be seen as a collection of individuals in constant competition—with the virtuous wealthy (makers) naturally prevailing over the undeserving poor (takers).

Ironically Rand herself never framed making and taking in such simplistic terms. Instead she saw both forces coalescing against the real enemy: big government. In this view, producing and consuming are not opposed to each other, but instead represent the highest of personal values. Rand’s free market vision attached no guilt in the honest making/taking of goods or maximization of wealth. Thus, when society’s individualized maker/takers run into trouble they are completely justified in finding new ways of operating: fresh territories to tame, markets to occupy, or populations to dispossess. Dispossession can assume many forms—ranging from the material belongings or resources of the vulnerable, to the very sense of belonging associated with membership in the acquisitive economy. In this view, dispossession has both physical and metaphysical dimensions—unified by certain principles: the disposability of individuals and groups, the privatization and commodification of what is public, and the moral righteousness of neoliberal modernity.

The Wealth of Nations

The makers-and-takers debate has deep roots in the American psyche. Democracy may not require a market economy, but capitalism inheres in democracy’s Euro-American history. A tension between private and public interest was built into the U.S. economic system from the beginning, owing to 18th-century beliefs that this balance would self-regulate—much as it was thought that gun ownership required no oversight. As initially conceived by Adam Smith, the “invisible hand” of the private marketplace required little more than modest taxation for the public good. Somewhat forgotten today, Smith fully advocated the appropriate role of government in such things as the funding of schools, the building of bridges and roads, and of course the maintenance of the national military. Smith’s The Wealth of Nations set forth a philosophy of economic principles based on newly recognized Enlightenment ideals of individualism. Set against the backdrop of oligarchical tyranny, Smith and other...