Needless to say, the Spectacle is full of object lessons in how not to think, or perhaps better, in un-thought masquerading as thought. Some time ago I offered the example of a 'tradition' of 'anti-Americanism', cobbled together from stray bits of Rilke, Heidegger and others. The passage quoted from Heidegger is this: "This circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption is the sole procedure which distinctively characterizes the history of a world which has become an unworld." Not immediately transparent, of course, and in need of careful contextualisation and unpicking. Heidegger's essay 'Overcoming Metaphysics', from which this passage is lifted, is part of a book that coincidentally dropped through my letterbox this morning. It is a dense and difficult essay, concerning technology and its relation to the Earth; it considers the radical mutation undergone by Being and our understanding of Being (the two things are inseperable). But it says nothing whatever about 'America'.
It thus struck me that our author and his 'anti-americanism' resembled nothing so much as a mad carpenter's table. Just as our author glued together various bits and pieces into a 'concept', so the mad carpenter builds a table from random bits and pieces of wood and junk taken from sundry different places and objects; finally he points triumphantly at his table saying 'see, this shows that all those bits of wood and junk were secretly all along part of this table.'
Heidegger's essay is, perhaps, 'reactionary' - heavy with nostalgia for a lost Earth, offering us in the end only the figure of the lone shepherd, as proudly isolated as Yeats' fisherman, a figure both literal and symbolic, a figure still attuned and responsive to the silent call of the earth, but a figure now little more than a dwindling image of Greek-ness on history's retina. But whatever the essay is, it is on a different shore from 'Anti-Americanism' and the world of pseudo-concepts into which 'anti-americanism' passes with painless facility.