I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. --James Baldwin Notes of a Native Son
It would be easy to construct a ‘concept’ of ‘pro-Americanism” cobbled together from, say, some quotes from Blake, Kafka, Foucault, Kristeva and other ‘European intellectuals’. One could then claim this was a kind of ‘syndrome’, a stubborn tradition to which we’re still in thrall when we say anything that is pro-American. One could cite various contemporary pro-American statements as ‘evidence’ of this ‘syndrome’. This concept would doubtless have many polemical uses. Except, of course, it is unlikely that such a ‘concept’ would have or accrue any intellectual credibility or be seen as anything other than a rather crude device for forestalling debate.
How curious, then, that the similarly structured ‘concept’ of ‘anti-Americanism’ seems to be going from strength to strength, as in this recent essay, wherein Heidegger, Rilke and diverse others are conscripted into illustrating what is essentially foreign to them and, stripped of their particular contexts and their inherent differences, frogmarched into serving as mere examples of an ‘idea’ having as its ultimate referent and sticking place only the polemical demands of the present. The author, the instrument of ideological forces of which he seems wholly ignorant, cites the following passage from Rilke:
Now is emerging from out of America pure undifferentiated things, mere things of appearance, sham articles.... A house in the American understanding, an American apple or an American vine has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, or the grape that had been adopted in the hopes and thoughts of our forefathers
As well as this from Heidegger:
Consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure that distinctively characterizes the history of a world that has become an unworld.
Each of these comments [ok, so the second one doesn’t actually mention America. Let that pass] can be located in (and against) a tradition of thought; each deserves to be heard and answered in its specificity; but a ‘thinker’ able to extract from such comments no more than the anaemic and mechanical concept of ‘anti-Americanism’ resembles nothing so much as a winemaker able to extract from a grape little more than its stem. What is inessential is elevated to spurious magnitude and what is essential discarded as so much unserviceable dross.
Yes, Rilke uses ‘America’ to name – gropingly - something that he sees emerging, a new object-world, something which we might, perhaps, call the Society of the Spectacle; Heidegger was trying to conceptualise something perhaps related, although certainly not the same. And the name America was indeed, perhaps, a moment in this conceptualisation. But such comments are not ‘about’ America. One can easily jettison the name ‘America’ in understanding such comments, indeed, it is crucial to do so. Such names block access to the true object of thought. Nor can such invocations be situated, without ignorance and wilful distortion, on a smooth continuum ending in the present.
This is not to suggest (very obviously) that there are not anti-American sentiments or remarks, but surely no one believes that the current concept of Anti-Americanism is simply a way of neutrally referring to these, nor that an ‘anti-American’ sentiment is automatically a manifestation of ‘anti-Americanism’. This last is an ideological notion which I suspect will become more prevalent as it becomes polemically and politically more necessary.
Anti-Americanism, if we can use the term non-ideologically, might refer to instances where there is a false conflation between ‘America’ and some specific action of its government or, alternatively, some general concept like ‘aggression’ or ‘consumerism’. The point, however, is that any such conflation is illegitimate, favourable or unfavourable. Thus, a statement like ‘they hate America because they hate freedom’ (not an e.g. that I have invented incidentally) makes exactly the same false equation, as does a statement like this, from the anti-Frenchist ‘No Pasaran’ blog (so puerile that I refuse to link to it):
‘Why has it become so acceptable that — at elegant dinner parties — very distinguished people openly say, 'I'm not anti-American, but Bush disgusts me and makes me physically sick? He is a war criminal and a real threat to world peace.' I can only interpret such statements as being partly about Bush and partly about using him as an acceptable cover to bash America.’
The criticism that people say “America” when they really mean the Bush administration (or Starbucks, or whatever) typically sits cheek by jowl with the assumption that nobody speaks of the ‘Bush administration’ (or Starbucks, or whatever) without meaning ‘America’. Bsljukhl;kljeh
To bash America: the covert aim of so many particular arguments and objections, which are thus robbed of their force and rewritten as mere resentment. Is this – America as the object of resentment and envy - not among the most clichéd and stubborn tropes of contemporary polemics? And this ‘gaze of resentment’, far from being something which the polemicists wish to abolish is their cherished object of desire and indispensable ideological support.
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Genuine dialogue between America and the Soviet Union will only become possible when Americans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of capitalist ideology
Rand Omidyolog
Every era of course has its Rand Omidyologs. Anyway, for some reason, I forgot to add the following to my earlier comments on an essay on ‘anti-Americanism’. I quote: “A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media's coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans.”
Let’s be clear what’s being said here: You encounter perspectives and accounts different from the one you are familiar with. They render what was familiar to you almost unrecognisable. Does this excite your interest, activate your curiosity, lead you to reappraise the familiar; does it set in motion a process of questioning? No, the very fact that these perspectives render your world unfamiliar is enough to impugn them. And all that is questioned are the (perforce malign) ‘motives’ of those responsible for disturbing your familiar picture.
And the essay ends by stipulating the terms of any future European admittance to the negotiating table: ‘Genuine dialogue between America and Europe will become possible only when Europeans start the long and arduous process of freeing themselves from the grip of anti-Americanism’ It is, presumably, a ‘long and arduous’ process because anti-Americanism is so ingrained and inveterate that we can barely gauge its extent. Europeans are, perhaps, steeped in it even against their conscious intent or knowledge. They ‘carry it’ and reproduce it willy-nilly – scarcely subjects of their own thoughts. Much soul-searching will be needed. So, ‘Europeans’, before you venture to speak, re-examine yourself, see if any anti-American sentiments breed about your hearts, and if you sense such sentiments expurgate and correct them. You’ll be rewarded with admittance to ‘genuine dialogue’ albeit in Caeser’s terms [sorry, my mistake- the author's name is in fact Ceaser]. A blogger has drawn my attention to his own piece on 'anti-American prejudice', which he admits to being 'prone to'.