Post-American
Mar. 11th, 2006 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIt's slightly strange for me to be back in America, because, personally, I'm post-American. Starting in 1996, I visited the US many times to play shows and do tours. I even ended up moving to New York, where I lived between March 2000 and March 2002. For a little while I might even have looked "pre-American" -- in the sense that I might have considered taking steps towards some kind of permanent residency status (as my ex-wife is now doing, though without any great enthusiasm). But after the Bush "victory" in 2000 and 9/11, I quickly became "post-American". I lost any interest in living in this country.
So it's entirely appropriate that the biennial which has brought me back is being widely described as "the post-American biennial". That term is an interesting one, and it's being used with different shades of meaning. The most trivial sense is how Linda Yablonsky in the New York Times uses the phrase: this is the "post-American" biennial because curators Philippe Vergne and Chrissie Iles are both Europeans, and because for the first time the Whitney Biennial is including foreign-born artists (like me).
Jerry Saltz, in his review of the Whitney Biennial in the Village Voice, uses the term with a wider political implication. For him the show is both "un-American" and "post-America":
"Iles and Vergne are European, more than a quarter of the 101 participating artists were born outside the U.S., and sundry others live elsewhere part-time. Even the show's title comes from a French movie, François Truffaut's 1973 film, although the movie's original title describes the biennial and the country better, The American Night."
"This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can't or won't do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly... "Day for Night" speaks to a nation that is no longer an ideal but only a country. That makes this the Post-America Biennial."
Over at Time Out, Andrea K. Scott tells us that "Day For Night, the new Whitney Biennial, pledges allegiance to post-America":
"Iles is British and Vergne is French, and this year the outmoded "made in the USA" Biennial mandate has been pretty much scrapped... Even the phrase "Day For Night" has foreign roots: It's the English translation of the title to Francois Truffaut's film La Nuit Americaine.... These are dark days, Iles and Vergne seem to suggest. The country is a Halliburton-backed war machine and art has pushed past its borders into a liminal twilight zone. The real accomplishment of this biennial may be in "Prying History Loose, Not Nailing It Down" (to quote Bradley Eros's essay in the exceptionally well-conceived catalog). Despite the occasional splinter, the curators have successfully dismantled the house that Breuer (and Altria) built, with an eye on a post-American world."
The origin of this talk of "post-America" is this statement of the curators in the biennial catalog: "At a moment when world opinion of the United States is at its lowest ebb... there seemed to be a particular urgency to make a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist... The "day for night" that it reveals suggests an impulse that could be termed premodern, or pre-Enlightenment, confirming the sociologist of science Bruno Latour's argument that we have yet to become modern. We are, in other words, in a "post-America," in which America has become more of a nation than an ideal."
Now, clearly this "post-America" meme stands in opposition to the meme of the "project for a new American century", the fundamental document of the neo-con regime, justification for endless hawkish American interventions throughout the world. "Post-America" suggests that the "new American century" has already failed, a suspicion confirmed by any glance at the headlines from Iraq, or any comparison of New York's 20th century skyline with Shanghai's 21st century one.
There are other uses of the term "post-American", though. Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant lobby opposed to the granting of American citizenship to Mexicans, or to the employment of non-American soldiers in the US military, citizens of countries like the Philippines, lured by the possibility of a US green card ("Give me American citizenship or give me death", you could call it). Here's Krikorian in the National Review:
"Let me be clear what I mean by a post-American. He's not an enemy of America — not Alger Hiss or Jane Fonda or Louis Farrakhan. He's not necessarily even a Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy. A post-American may actually still like America, but the emotion resembles the attachment one might feel to, say, suburban New Jersey — it can be a pleasant place to live, but you're always open to a better offer. The post-American has a casual relationship with his native country, unlike the patriot, "who more than self his country loves," as Katharine Lee Bates wrote. Put differently, the patriot is married to America; the post-American is just shacking up.
"Now, there are two kinds of post-American. David Frum, in his "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article for NR last year, highlighted what I think is the less important kind: Those who focus on something less than America, whether white nationalists or neo-Confederates, etc. The second, more consequential and problematic kind are those who have moved beyond America, "citizens of the world," as the cliché goes — in other words citizens (at least in the emotional sense) of nowhere in particular."
This definition comes in an article entitled "Post-Americans: They’ve just “grown” beyond their country." The inverted commas around "grown" -- as well as his phrase "citizens of nowhere in particular" -- make Krikorian's attitude to these people clear: they're A Bad Thing. He ends the article with a question: "The most important long-term political question we face: Who are we — America or post-America?"
One of the pieces I do in the Biennial is a short joke, a piece of disinformation: "America will soon be a part of the European Union." It may not be true, but one thing I've noticed is that many of the young Americans who've been talking to me in the gallery are planning to leave the US at the earliest opportunity, to live in Europe or elsewhere. They're post-Americans in the way Krikorian describes... and deplores.
Unlike Krikorian, I'm not worried by these people at all; they seem sane and wise, well-prepared to deal with a post-American world. It's the ones who stay at home, the 93% of Americans who don't have a passport but who do vote for governments with a foreign policy, who worry me, and especially the kinds of policies they may start voting for when they begin to notice that the 21st century is beginning to look distinctly... post-American.
So it's entirely appropriate that the biennial which has brought me back is being widely described as "the post-American biennial". That term is an interesting one, and it's being used with different shades of meaning. The most trivial sense is how Linda Yablonsky in the New York Times uses the phrase: this is the "post-American" biennial because curators Philippe Vergne and Chrissie Iles are both Europeans, and because for the first time the Whitney Biennial is including foreign-born artists (like me). Jerry Saltz, in his review of the Whitney Biennial in the Village Voice, uses the term with a wider political implication. For him the show is both "un-American" and "post-America":
"Iles and Vergne are European, more than a quarter of the 101 participating artists were born outside the U.S., and sundry others live elsewhere part-time. Even the show's title comes from a French movie, François Truffaut's 1973 film, although the movie's original title describes the biennial and the country better, The American Night."
"This show, and the art world, are trying to do what America can't or won't do: Use its power wisely, innovatively, and with attitude; be engaged and, above all, not define being a citizen of the world narrowly... "Day for Night" speaks to a nation that is no longer an ideal but only a country. That makes this the Post-America Biennial."
Over at Time Out, Andrea K. Scott tells us that "Day For Night, the new Whitney Biennial, pledges allegiance to post-America":
"Iles is British and Vergne is French, and this year the outmoded "made in the USA" Biennial mandate has been pretty much scrapped... Even the phrase "Day For Night" has foreign roots: It's the English translation of the title to Francois Truffaut's film La Nuit Americaine.... These are dark days, Iles and Vergne seem to suggest. The country is a Halliburton-backed war machine and art has pushed past its borders into a liminal twilight zone. The real accomplishment of this biennial may be in "Prying History Loose, Not Nailing It Down" (to quote Bradley Eros's essay in the exceptionally well-conceived catalog). Despite the occasional splinter, the curators have successfully dismantled the house that Breuer (and Altria) built, with an eye on a post-American world."The origin of this talk of "post-America" is this statement of the curators in the biennial catalog: "At a moment when world opinion of the United States is at its lowest ebb... there seemed to be a particular urgency to make a bold curatorial statement about the current zeitgeist... The "day for night" that it reveals suggests an impulse that could be termed premodern, or pre-Enlightenment, confirming the sociologist of science Bruno Latour's argument that we have yet to become modern. We are, in other words, in a "post-America," in which America has become more of a nation than an ideal."
Now, clearly this "post-America" meme stands in opposition to the meme of the "project for a new American century", the fundamental document of the neo-con regime, justification for endless hawkish American interventions throughout the world. "Post-America" suggests that the "new American century" has already failed, a suspicion confirmed by any glance at the headlines from Iraq, or any comparison of New York's 20th century skyline with Shanghai's 21st century one.There are other uses of the term "post-American", though. Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant lobby opposed to the granting of American citizenship to Mexicans, or to the employment of non-American soldiers in the US military, citizens of countries like the Philippines, lured by the possibility of a US green card ("Give me American citizenship or give me death", you could call it). Here's Krikorian in the National Review:
"Let me be clear what I mean by a post-American. He's not an enemy of America — not Alger Hiss or Jane Fonda or Louis Farrakhan. He's not necessarily even a Michael Moore or Ted Kennedy. A post-American may actually still like America, but the emotion resembles the attachment one might feel to, say, suburban New Jersey — it can be a pleasant place to live, but you're always open to a better offer. The post-American has a casual relationship with his native country, unlike the patriot, "who more than self his country loves," as Katharine Lee Bates wrote. Put differently, the patriot is married to America; the post-American is just shacking up.
"Now, there are two kinds of post-American. David Frum, in his "Unpatriotic Conservatives" article for NR last year, highlighted what I think is the less important kind: Those who focus on something less than America, whether white nationalists or neo-Confederates, etc. The second, more consequential and problematic kind are those who have moved beyond America, "citizens of the world," as the cliché goes — in other words citizens (at least in the emotional sense) of nowhere in particular."
This definition comes in an article entitled "Post-Americans: They’ve just “grown” beyond their country." The inverted commas around "grown" -- as well as his phrase "citizens of nowhere in particular" -- make Krikorian's attitude to these people clear: they're A Bad Thing. He ends the article with a question: "The most important long-term political question we face: Who are we — America or post-America?"
One of the pieces I do in the Biennial is a short joke, a piece of disinformation: "America will soon be a part of the European Union." It may not be true, but one thing I've noticed is that many of the young Americans who've been talking to me in the gallery are planning to leave the US at the earliest opportunity, to live in Europe or elsewhere. They're post-Americans in the way Krikorian describes... and deplores.
Unlike Krikorian, I'm not worried by these people at all; they seem sane and wise, well-prepared to deal with a post-American world. It's the ones who stay at home, the 93% of Americans who don't have a passport but who do vote for governments with a foreign policy, who worry me, and especially the kinds of policies they may start voting for when they begin to notice that the 21st century is beginning to look distinctly... post-American.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 04:28 pm (UTC)Thanks for this post.
I now know that how I feel is "post-American".
I lived there until 10 years ago, but sometimes felt like I didn't fit, and this is more than likely why. I don't feel patriotic and never was a flag-waver. Most people think I am odd for not prefering the US over the UK, and even odder when I say I no longer want to ever live there (especially with the political climate there!).
Unfortunately for those young Americans talking to you about living elsewhere, it has become harder to just pick up and go. It was hard for me 10 years ago, but I married an Englishman which made it easier (FYI-this was NOT a marriage of convenience-I love him and it was a decision made of who was to move where and I think the decision for me to move to the UK was the wise one). I notice that laws are tightening even more.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 04:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 04:51 pm (UTC)I live in one of the fightin' blue states, and the citified liberal part of it at that. but even the advertising here is getting more heteronormative, more Christian, and more ugly.
I'm too old to fall into the young, leave as soon as possible mindset. It's hard enough to scrape out one's corner in a place where one doesn't have a funny accent (and for me that's nearly everywhere else in this country, as well as abroad.)
should we all just give up and leave? isn't it at least as noble, or responsible, to stay and demand things be examined and restored here?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 04:57 pm (UTC)I still can vote in US (and Illinois/Chicago elections) and do my best to make sure my voice is still heard. But the Religious Right and the latest with Roe vs Wade has me sad and knowing that the US I was born in no longer exists, and probably will never exist again.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 05:02 pm (UTC)New York is not America in the sense Kansas in. When you are in New York hanging with artists and intellectuals you are in a world capital, regardless of its national government I have always considered NYC to be a sort of independent city state. I am ambivalent about my continued residency in the US but it is my dream to live in New York, which is to 2006 what London was to 1900 .. maybe a little past its prime, with up and comers threatening, but still a key focus of world events, culture and commerce. In fifty years it will be different but I still consider New York to be a world capital.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 05:06 pm (UTC)When I first came here in '86 when the "America" cultural bubble was bursting, people were still proud, and truly many of them were arrogant towards the rest of the world with their righteous ideology. Now, I still stand out in a crowd here as I ever did, but no-one looks at me with that pride here anymore, judging me for being different. They've lost it, especially the rednecks. Now they judge with shame or guilt, or pretend to ignore the fact that I am dressed differently. I think they are coming to the sense that their sloppiness and lack of enthusiasm for life don't accomplish anything.
But, and I mean most rednecks, seem to still be culturally centered on American culture, though they are no longer proud of it. I wonder how long it will take before they begin to look out at what is happening in the rest of the world -- not to deny that there are some who do, but they are the exception not the rule. This from a different perspective than living in an interesting city like New York.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 05:10 pm (UTC)Yes, that is scary. This survey paints a pretty clear picture.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geosurvey/download/RoperSurvey.pdf
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 05:10 pm (UTC)I still think that being post-American and staying to challenge is acceptable. Why should we leave those idiots here with all the big toys.
Keep voting, and don't apologize for having a happy marriage!
sort of OT...
Date: 2006-03-11 05:14 pm (UTC)Re: sort of OT...
Date: 2006-03-11 05:26 pm (UTC)Post-American Pax-Americana
Date: 2006-03-11 05:36 pm (UTC)Most of my friends (in their mid-twenties) have considered or are in the process of leaving the US. These are white, middle class, American born former students.
A very interesting thing about work in this country: for those who majored in one of the humanities (like myself), the best paying work is if one were to teach English out of the US, such as Japan.
Anyone who leaves the US now, either on vacation or to find residency, will find more hostility than before, obviously. But it seems a small price to pay for the removal of blood on one's hands.
What I was most enthralled about with this piece was that I'm attempting to capture this "post-American" idea on film. Call it the transition period between American and post-American, an identity crisis. A bizarre time to be living in this country, but like all of us who live here, we've never been one people, never terribly connected, and always hiding from one another. All of this is merely heightened, and for some of us, it's time to go.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 06:58 pm (UTC)It's not 'post-Americanism' or an outgrowth of any particular cultural sophistication. It's vaginitis. The classical Darwinian displacement of the weaker population by the stronger, and consequent purification of the gene pool. Or somesuch.
More likely it's neither, and his no particular significance, as America continues to replace those of its best and brightest who leave with many more of the best and brightest from Mexico and the Phillipines and Canada and yes, China. Skyscrapers are certainly important, I've said so myself, but there really is more to a culture than building the biggest phallic symbols.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 07:25 pm (UTC)The hardest part would be trying to remember to call "soccer" "football" and "football" "American football".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 08:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 10:23 pm (UTC)- Politicians from countries outside of America who implement American laws in their own countries and follow American war-mongering policies (they are obviously still thinking in "New American Century" terms);
- Countries that import American TV dramas and Californian navel oranges even though they can make/grow their own;
- Non-Americans who say "dude", "bro" and "buddie";
- Non-American bands who want above all to break into the American market;
- Nick Cave;
and the list goes on.
I think that a well level minded way to think about America is that it is just another country, not ahead not behind of anyone, instead of having this image of it being the number one country.
America certainly must have been attractive to artists back when Duchamp, Schoenberg, Ernst, etc., all moved there but nowadays there are other attractive destinations around the world as well I'm sure.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-11 11:53 pm (UTC)Re: sort of OT...
Date: 2006-03-12 12:37 am (UTC)(I'm pretty sure Mr. Momus will become annoyed with us gothgirling in his journal if we keep this up. Add me back -- if we don't have friends in common yet, we will.)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-12 12:45 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-12 02:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-12 04:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-12 05:06 am (UTC)Nothing. The whole area is a damn "development zone." If you cross over to the other side and stand next to those buildings, you will see a vast wasteland surrounding it.