From: rooney@cheshire.oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney)
Subject: Re: Trash
Followup-To: alt.postmodern
Summary: American pop culture and its kudzuesque qualities
Keywords: cultural struggle
Organization: Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA 90041 USA.
Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1992 21:21:19 GMT

In article <JTV8RB2w165w@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> rc@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
>
>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.  My blind speculation 
(i.e., best guess) is that American culture is a particularly 
ruthless and purified strain of West European laissez-faire culture.
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.  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 seems a propo for Columbus Day.

Cordially,

Michael S. Rooney

"As for the comment at the end regarding the creation of the world,
 this is quite irrelevant."