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, atHUNTER high school, salvatore vergone, hosea johnson, l. francois, mayumi, robert haig, miriam borenstein, robert amin, rob amin 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, julia bedriy, l. francois, 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
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