Self-reproducing systems / The question of "America"

I had some lingering thoughts about the class discussion that Tom led two weeks ago. Specifically, I wanted to futher explore his concluding question apropos of an apparent ambiguity at the end of No-No Boy: Was the text working to retrospectively redeem the notional content of the socio-political signifier "America" (i.e., the merits of individual will, prosperity via liberal/modern conceptions of "free enterprise," the constitutive importance of cultural plurality, etc.)? Or was it, instead, articulating a foundational critique of that very content—so as to complicate a field of political discourse that, despite myriad empirical inadequacies in the post-modern / post-colonial world, still sought (and still seeks) to conceptualize the world within the bounds of liberal ideology (which is, in essence, and beyond any particular claim, what the signifier "America" stands for contemporarily)? In other words, does No-No Boy claim that the "project of America"—and the various sensibilities of freedom, autonomy, and equality entailed thereby—failed in some particular context (e.g., of Japanese internment, or perhaps of WWII-era and post-WWII-era race relations more generally)? Or does it claim, rather more forcefully, that the project was doomed from the outset?

I think Tom was right to emphasize the comparative radicality of the second claim as compared to the first. If No-No Boy merely highlights one or more instances in which "America" fails to live up to its overdetermined ideological promise, it's not so far from dominant historical narratives that attempt to mitigate and legitimize present conditions by depicting grandiosely horrific past-situations (along the lines of, e.g., "Look how mean and imperial the explorers were toward native peoples [thankfully we have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes—and more to the point, we've already learned from their mistakes]"). Indeed, No-No Boy can be construed as radical only insofar as it attempts to genuinely transform the socio-symbolic coordinates of "America," by rejecting, in other words, the very liberal/modern foundations on which all dominant conceptions of "America" are founded. Yet what if this dichotomy is already illegitimate? Perhaps a space for contestation/ transformation is built into the discursive fabric of "America" and therefore it's impossible—or at least analytically misleading—to differentiate between a) the legitimation and b) the transformation of "America." That is to say, what if "America" refers, ideologically speaking, to the project of continual transformation itself? Indeed, is this not precisely the message of traditional "melting pot" / "salad bowl" / etc. narratives? As Barack Obama articulated it in his recent "race" speech, only in America could a story like his—son of an African man and a white women (and becoming president to boot!)—have come to pass. Which is to say, America is wonderful precisely because it allows for internal transformation of its symbolic content (here, in terms of the demographics of its polity).

This question—whether transformation is an integral part of America's ideological-symbolic content—overlaps interestingly with another strand of class discussion re: the "post-" prefix and its legitimate deployment. Tom—citing Seung Hye's question, if I remember correctly—asked whether or not the Black Eyes Peas could be construed as an example of "post-hip-hop." There's always an ambiguity in the "post-" prefix: Does it designate a legitimate end, or merely a space of potential redemption after something has gone awry? Consider the term "postmodernity." If we've moved beyond the modern, is it a) because modernity, as a set of truth-claims and political impulses, was flawed from the start, or b) because the (ultimately valuable) project of modernity got corrupted somewhere along the way (e.g., in fascism), and the space of postmodernity thus offers an opportunity to restore the "true" principles of modernity? In terms of the hip-hop / post-hip-hop question: Are the Black Eyed Peas (assuming we do, in fact, understand their music as "post-hip-hop") attempting to produce an entirely new musical form, or rather, are they trying to revivify the original impetus of hip-hop (which has since become corrupted by commercialization etc.)?

Once again, however, we're faced with the same illegitimate dichotomy—a dichotomy that only holds if we ignore the possibility that both alternatives can be simultaneously true: what if modernity became corrupted because its internal flaw was precisely that it was destined to become corrupted? In other words, what if, in going awry, modernity actually came to full fruition? Practically speaking, this implies that something like fascism represents a corruption of modernity—but it's an internal corruption, a corruptioin that was unavoidable by virtue of modernity's own, self-corrupting impulse. We should note how this re-formulation undermines both previous positions: now, it is not simply that modernity either a) became corrupted, or b) was flawed to begin with, but rather, that so long as we understand the modern impulse to be one of self-overcoming, both claims amount to exactly the same. To tie this back to the discussion above, if "America" is able to self-revolutionize by incorporating its own discursive contestation in this way, then traditional forms of political resistance (textual or otherwise) lose their efficacy. When we consider the differences between contesting and affirming the concept of "America" (the ambiguity offered by Tom), is not the proper response that neither is more radical than the other, precisely because they coalesce: in the context of "America," to contest is to affirm—to affirm a conceptual matrix based on contestation. So, where does this leave us, praxis-wise? The only way to disrupt the reproduction of "America"—a political project worthy of our deliberation, I think—is to insist on the absolute, static, meta-historical value of terms like Freedom, Community, and Success (those paradigmatic signifiers of "America"). We must develop a political framework that makes "America" neither its affirmative nor oppositional starting point, but rather, articulates a universality distinct unto itself. We should strive to reach the point at which it becomes possible to say: We are uninterested in America's symbolic hegemony one way or another—the new political community will be realized regardless.