When we forget why.

To those of you who are interested to know how I am doing on the other side of the Atlantic, on the other side of the Pacific to some, and I expect this less, I am not unwell and yet I live day after day with a great sense of frustration.  I'm not sure if this is any different from the way I felt wherever I ever was.  Frustration seems to be that space between the nihilism/anarchism that is fortunately or unfortunately the way life is and that fear driven narrative that keeps us in one piece.  There is no culture shock when one arrives in America, I said last night.  The idea, they said, was that American culture was so easily exported, by the time we arrive here our senses have already been taught what to expect.  One forgets that Coca-cola is an American legacy.  So there are no surprises here, not that I expected surprises or that I have any interest in such banal frivolity.  If one had ever imagined what the ordinary was, here it is.  The normative that we have become so accustomed to wherever it was that we lived, I should say. The secret, as far as I see it, is that the American identity is the least restrictive.  Of all modern conceptions of culturo-national self, the American way is the most open to interpretation, and this is the very void, I feel, that the obsession for the symbol (the flag, authenticity, Marlborough man, the Ivy letter culture) is based.  Indeed, it is a society where language is extremely restricted in the name of a history to be constructed/reconstructed, the openness potential of interaction demands the need for a restricted expression of such a potential. People here are very politically correct.  The question is how important political correctness is if 'inside' people harbor racialist nostalgic-sentiment.  The question between the utterance and the self.  The deed and the doer.  But where the notion of the other as an utterance is removed, eventually the other as an essentialist conception shall also disappear, is how I feel.  Racism is at most a phenomenal - apparent or visible - reality, the phenomenal is made up of the visual and associated sentimental linguistic orientations.  Where these associations are untangled racism shall disappear.  How to untangle? Raising employment rates and thereby decreasing fear may do, but on a point that returns to my observations on America, to have a society that is very aware of its language seems more effective in affecting change in the long run.  Language is the way through which what we may decide to call the 'social fabric' is formed.  This imagined societal embodiment is one that is organized through language and utterance.  It is the utterance that must be reconceived.  So, that is to say that the Americans have a very particular relationship to the utterance.

Last night I was talking to someone, I told her of what seemed important to me.  To help people of the most underprivileged sections of society.  Those sections afflicted by the effects of a criminal drug culture, suffering etc.  She disagreed, apparently she didn't like the fact that I associated such a culture with the poor.  She said this was a problem in all sections of the society.  This ended up becoming a very difficult conversation.  One similar to the notion that in America the word 'ghetto' has now apparently become a taboo of sorts.  It is very difficult to talk in America.  I then said, domestic violence, thats everywhere too.  Umm...unemployment.  Ok, then.  The idea of a divided society in America seems very different to that which I have experienced in my life so far.  The division here is that which takes place through the utterance.  The utterance that is beyond a mundane notion of high/low culture.  The one that manages to be politically correct shall win.  The most respectful of all shall win.  In some ways Obama is the most respectful man on earth and similarly, for this very reason, I would argue that he is the winner of all.

But the problem is the relationship between respect and compassion.  The problem is that respect assumes a certain distancing.  The American culture that emphasizes respect also seems to lack compassion.  The success that is attained through respect of the individual means that people don't necessarily have to care for one another.  I made it because I worked hard.  You have the same opportunities, if you don't make it thats your problem.  To respect someone and to love someone are two different things.  I can respect you but I don't have to love you.  So conflict is reduced thanks to respect but love seems to be dead.  Nostalgia is killed thanks to respect, but with this sentimentality is also killed.  The difference between nostalgia and sentimentality?  The former is the negative emotional disposition that looks back, protects in fear.  Sentimentality is that sense of a forwardly compassion that truly overcomes the fear through deeds that express this very fact.  This is the distinction that I draw anyway.  So that culture of respect that is based in a fear and thereby overcomes it through the utterance, or often the non-utterance may kill the dangers of nostalgia, the very thing that brought people to America to begin with, but it also kills the compassion that should be what keeps humanity together.

When I tell people here that I find America to be far more progressive than Europe, they are surprised.  But I tell them that the European radicals were conservative of their position as any other socio-political position to be found in Europe.  Indeed, I do believe that the utterance is what will change the society.  Bottom-up, one could say.  But that movement shall only come about through top-down incentive.  As in Rorty, we honestly can't think that revolution is going to come about.  The European radicals that I met seemed to still await this day.  This is what I got tired of.  And so I came to America, this was a nation where those at the very bottom could reach the very top, surely, in such a society top-down change could take place.  And then what do I find?  The lack of compassion that is brought about through that very respect that took people from the very bottom to the very top to begin with.  I have come here in absolute admiration of the American ideal and what do I find?  Incredibly successful people who made it from the very bottom who lack passion in their utterance.  The utterance is dead.  It is syntactically beautiful, to use Abbott's notion in his discussion on the social scientific method, and yet lack in any form of compassion.  People know the right things to say but don't feel it for a single moment.  I asked a very beautiful man, a very kind man, a very good man, a very intelligent man, what was important to him, 'firstly, before anything' he said, I want to say that I love my wife.  I know you do but you know thats not what I'm asking, so why say something like that?  The political correctness is the only way forward darling Europe. Europe, in my mind, unfortunately, you are somewhat doomed.  You shall always remain in the dark ages of a society that heralds racism and kisses the Queen's ass.  And yet America, when the Europeans heckled me for my decision to fall into your arms for they said you were too emotional and cheesey, I defended you with all my passion, it was America that nostalgia was no more, it was America that there was compassion, and yet I am disappointed.  America, you are the only true hope that the world has, this is true, the rest of the world from London to Tokyo have very little idea about this, but let us not fall complacent as cultural progressives, there is more work to be done.  To turn that respect that was the antidote to nostalgia into forwardly sentiment and compassion.  Only in a society that realizes the power of the utterance shall social change be possible, for it is the utterance that defines us as the dynamic construction that we are.  America realized this at some point, I shall leave it to others to identify when it was that this happened whether during the civil rights movement, I would say DuBois a personal hero, was there before most of us.  With the 'semiotic turn' the Europeans thought they were ever so radical, and it seems like it is only now that it is coming to life through the power to be found in the institutions that are driven by the motives of cultural studies.  But the Americans knew this before most of us, see.  And yet, I will continue to implore that America may realize its compassion.  The question is whether the overtly rational/pragmatic society that is America, as I see it, may overcome such a rational/pragmatic self in order to realize a forwardly sentimentality.  To realize that sentimentality IS the pragmatic way.  And although this requires that we ignore the threats of fear, once we have achieved this position the society can attain an increased harmony.  Where rational choices are made for sentimental ends.  The symbol is employed in the name of sentimentality, an other that in the past may have incurred multiple fears within one's consciousness.  And where the symbol is applied in such a manner I believe we may be able to approach the Kantian kingdom of ends where although not all will get what they demand they are, more importantly, happy for they know that they have gained something more profound in giving; and in such a way have gained in a way that is beyond the pathetic pleasures of the symbol in itself: post-symbolic sentimentality.

There seems to be so much success in America, so many symbols amongst the group that have the power to bring about social change, and sadly, those people who are meant to be talking about humanity don't seem to care for it enough.  Wait, I will add that there are some incredible teachers in America, though few, as anywhere, I will argue that these are the people who give me hope in America.  Funnily enough, these are the people who gave opportunities to so many and enabled those to go from rags to riches, those who I argue then go on to have very little compassion.  And I question how much the teacher is valued in America.  But that is another question altogether.

Despite my frustrations for what happens beneath all, I am happy to be in a place where the utterance is recognized, now the question is whether anyone with power will make that crucial utterance that may bring about, albeit slowly, social change.  And these are the ideas that America has motivated in me over the last few weeks.

Yasushi-Xavier