From: rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson)
Newsgroups: alt.postmodern
Subject: Re: Trash
Keywords: cultural struggle
Date: 8 Oct 92 14:00:01 GMT

rooney@cheshire.oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney) writes:

> In article <JTV8RB2w165w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richa
> >
> >That phenomenon of the victory of American culture is itself an
> >interesting one.  Why?  The music and movies get worse every year
> >any yet they supplant the native culture wherever they go, like
> >kudzu or like rabbits in Australia.  The majority of the French
> >people would rather see Arnold and Sylvester shoot up a gaggle of
> >bad guys than watch the great French classics by Francois
> >Truffault and the other old New Wave movie makers.  
> 
> 	This has been a pet problem for me for years, although the
> difficulty of formulating a coherent methodological approach to so
> huge an issue has kept me at mind's length.

It's one of those things that's inherently interesting and you
speculate about it and talk about it over the third beer, even
though it has nothing to do with anything else you might be
interested in.

> My blind speculation
> (i.e., best guess) is that American culture is a particularly 
> ruthless and purified strain of West European laissez-faire culture.

But with many African elements in its actual content.

> I use the clumsy term "laissez-faire culture" since the post-war
> cultural temperment seems to be one of general tolerance and "free"
> exchange in a very Lockean way.  Ideas and ideologies, philosophies
> and faiths are all placed on the market's block, to take or leave
> as one will.  Of course, this very notion of exchange turns on a
> Western notion of the self as (generally) rational actor, and so
> the only cultural worldviews likely to thrive in such conditions are
> precisely the ones which underpin the whole "cultural metanarrative"
> (N.b. to M. Zeleny: I am using metanarrative in a Lyotardesque, not
> strict narratological fashion, o net.pendant.) and so perpetuate it
> (and themselves).  This entire speculation is, of course, a loose 
> analogy to organic growth which, in its very growth, alters its
> environment so as to assure further propagation.  In programmatic
> fashion, then, one might say that as Western culture encounters other
> (partially or wholly) incommensurable cultures, it imposes a certain
> discourse, let us call it the "marketplace of ideas", under which
> it is presumed that the most rational or truest ideas prosper.

I don't know if Europeans have bought into the marketplace of
ideas metaphor to the same extent that the Anglo-American world
has.  They retain a more "elitist" notion of culture, high culture
at least, and most Germans, I suspect for example, would believe
it is a good thing to go to Beyreuth to hear Wagner's operas even
if they themselves preferred to listen to Michael Jackson.  I
think they think of high culture as a delicate flower which must
be protected and nurtured.  But they still go for the American
music and film and television when given a choice.

> Of
> course, this theoretical propagationism is a highly relativistic
> discourse in which the "fittest" theories are quite likely those
> endowed with the most favorable contingent factors (e.g., popularity
> amongst the wealthiest or most powerful classes).  It appears entirely
> possible that the most contingently favored discourse will be the 
> one which names itself the "norm", i.e., the "marketplace of ideas",
> as a superstructure, if you will permit me to utter such terribly 
> out-of-fashion Marxian concepts.  So the dominant culture declares
> itself absolutely "open" to other cultures, provided, of course, that
> they play by its rules, much as a Lockean landowner might self-
> satisfactorily declare that economic opportunity awaits in the "free"
> market, happily eliding his presupposed wealth and advantage.
> This remarkably stupid blindness to the transcendental conditions
> of one's own worldview is very American individualist, and its
> religious appeal to the anomic yet not-economically disenfranchised
> "postmodern" bourgeois citizen is amply demonstrated day-in and
> day-out on talk.politics.theory and other mass brain trust funds
> of Libertaria.

This is all interesting but it doesn't really explain why they
like the American stuff in the first place.

--
Richard Carlson
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