Goodbye to All That

What is this thing called 'America'?

On Lenox Ave/MX Blvd, looking southwest from 125th Street, Harlem, NYC, October 17, 2024, 6:20 PM

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A farewell note to "America," the meaning of which still eludes me after all these years of teaching and writing about it. That's the way it should be, I suppose, since we, the people, are still very much a work in progress, a developing nation. But on the eve of this departure, I can't help feel a sense of an ending.

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I’m headed for Italy tomorrow, where I’ll be staying in a little town south of Rome, courtesy of an old friend—she’s an erstwhile colleague long since recruited from Triple-A ball at Rutgers to the Bigs at Columbia—and from thence to another little town, in Spain, to visit some other old friends who live there as part-time ex-pats (one of whom is also an erstwhile colleague from Rutgers). We’ll be gone until mid-December, so we’ll miss the election and the tumult to follow. Well, not quite. I mailed my ballot yesterday. And we’ll be tuning in via phone, laptop, and, if our temporary quarters allow, TV as well (the girlfriend is on strike against the news for now, but she’ll join me on the eve and the morning after to mourn or celebrate, as the case requires).

As I pack, I ask myself, what is it you’re leaving behind? That question inevitably becomes another, bigger ask—what is it we will be leaving to posterity when the votes are counted, certified, acted upon? What will be left of the experiment in self-rule we call the United States? What is this thing that we, the people, represent, what is this “America,” our America? What is it that we stand to lose?

I’ve recently spent a lot of time with continental philosophers, mainly the late-20th century kind that, by all accounts, reshaped the humanities in higher education on this side of the Atlantic. You know the ones I mean, they’re the usual suspects denounced by Alan Bloom, Lynne Cheney, Robert Bork, Roger Kimball, Alan Sokal, and other hysterics convinced that the post-structuralists and post-modernists from the other shore were (and still are) corrupting or closing the gullible minds of American students because their professors, mere babes in the woods, fell (and remain) under the spell of “French Theory” as purveyed by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et al.

You’d think that my time with these big thinkers would have persuaded me that the hysterics got it right, that the infantile condition of American intellectual life hadn’t much improved in the 180 years since Emerson scolded his fellow writers, artists, and poets for being in thrall to European models. (“We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye,” he complained in 1842, “which knew the value of our incomparable materials.”) But you’d be wrong about that. Thinking with and about Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze has convinced me that the American intellectual tradition is a crucial source of “French Theory.”

It is of course true that these three have had an outsize effect on the disciplines we associate with the core curriculum, particularly History and Literature, in American higher education. But it is also true that what Fredric Jameson dismisses as the “age-old tradition of Anglo-American empiricism” determined their agendas. So you might say that “French Theory” was the highbrow equivalent of the “British Invasion” that gave us a new rendition of the blues—it transposed and translated an American idiom, then delivered it to the country of origin. That at least is the argument of the book I aim to finish in Spain. (I’m eight chapters and 93K words into it.)

How can this be? Start in the early 20th century. The most significant French intellectuals of that moment, Emile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Georges Sorel, Marcel Proust, and Rene Berthelot, were more or less obsessed with William James’s pragmatism; they certainly treated it as the regnant philosophy of their time. Bergson’s student, Jean Wahl, followed their lead and taught the next generation—Levinas, Derrida, and Deleuze, among others—that pragmatism, pluralism, and radical empiricism had shown the way beyond the Platonic tradition; meanwhile, Wahl drew on Anglo-American empiricism—especially Josiah Royce and Alfred North Whitehead—to became the single most important French interpreter of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, more important, at any rate, than Sartre, Koyre, Kojeve, and Hyppolite, all of whom acknowledged him as the center of intellectual gravity in mid-20th century France.

Wahl’s profound effects on Sartre, Hyppolite, and Levinas, then Derrida and Deleuze, can’t be overstated. Foucault is another story, him being the most aggressively anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist thinker in this lineup. But his default setting as both a philosopher of history and a political theorist was Nietzsche, the same figure that Derrida and Deleuze invoked when working their different ways back to or around Hegel and Marx. And it was Wahl who insisted, in his pathbreaking book of 1929, Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel—the first book of the 20th century in a European language devoted to The Phenomenology—that “on peut dire que le probleme de Nietzsche et le probleme de Hegel sont un seul et meme probleme.”

“America is deconstruction, . . . its family name, its toponymy.” That’s Jacques Derrida. “America brings together extracts, it presents samples from all ages, all lands, and all nations.” That’s Gilles Deleuze.

John Locke, G. W. F. Hegel, D. H. Lawrence, and many others have said something similar about this part of the world, from the moment of its “discovery” by Europeans to the present. Oswald Spengler identified the decline of the West with the American habit of monetizing everything, for example, as did Rainer Maria Rilke and his admirer, Martin Heidegger, who deployed the term “Americanization” as he explained how pragmatism was an exception to the rules of western metaphysics. The idea of America seems to have elicited and regulated the thinking of modern Europe. You might even say that absent the Other that is “America,” the idea of Europe was (and is) impossible: it was never the Old World, because its inventors assembled it using raw materials they extracted from the New. Talk about an indispensable nation.

With these observations in mind, what can—or how does—America mean to me, as I get ready to watch it from over there, as someone removed, this time literally, from the scene? Let me tarry with Madeline Albright’s memorable locution for a moment, minus all the connotations added to it by critics of “American exceptionalism,” who believe, wrongly, that the founders tried to wrest the US from the corrosions of historical time, making it exempt from the laws of historical motion that govern all other civilizations. In what sense is America the indispensable nation?

I’d say it becomes indispensable to the exact extent that it can’t be, or behave, as other nations have, or will. If that makes it exceptional, so be it. I’d prefer to call it the harbinger or the herald of the future—the cutting edge of civilization, for better or worse—because our condition both predicts and produces the planet’s futures; but for now what we call it is less important than understanding it.

Consider Deleuze’s characterization. America does what? It “presents samples from all ages, all lands, and all nations”? So, we were the hip-hop nation all along, just waiting to be born? Put the proposition in more formal language, borrow from Jameson’s dignified Marxist diction and say that in the American experience, it is normal, almost natural, to witness, in real time and space, the co-existence and interpenetration of distinct modes of production.

Here’s an example. I used to begin teaching the Harlem Renaissance by asking students to imagine they were a young black man or woman just arrived at the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue in, say, 1926. What could they see, hear, and feel? What would they be able to make of these sights, sounds, and impressions, how would they orient themselves in this world? I wish I could say I projected images on the classroom wall; instead I conjured the scene as follows. (It was an uncanny rehearsal for my life since 2010: my apartment is on 123rd near Lenox, which in 1926 was the southernmost edge of black settlement in Harlem.)

There you are, 22 years old, fresh off the train from D.C., where you went to high school with Jessie Fauset, a budding poet, because your parents, themselves teachers, had fled the Jim Crow regime of Georgia in 1902, as part of the first wave of an African-American disapora that would bring 2 million black people to northern cities by 1930. As you walked east on 125th from the train station at Park Ave, you heard several Southern dialects: two were barely intelligible as spoken by peasants, country people from somewhere deep in the Black Belt, wearing ragged coveralls, tattered shoes, and carrying their belongings in satchels, one was perfectly clear as spoken by a gentleman in a suit and tie, carrying a briefcase. You saw a couple of men your age in dungarees and T-shirts, with dirty hands and smudged faces, both carrying lunch pails, wearing boots, probably factory workers.

You heard a saxophone and, further on, some notes picked on a guitar, then a plaintive voice practicing a lyric, changing its sound and meaning every time even though you couldn’t quite make out the words. Phones rang out from the second floor windows overhead, and phonographs played music you’d never heard before, and couldn’t identify. A choir rehearsed a hymn you’d sung in church a hundred times. You smelled frying fish, onions, and okrah, the exhaust from cars on 125th, the sweat of those peasants and the factory workers as they passed, and then the perfume on the perfect, well-dressed bodies of the beautiful women who nodded and smiled as you stared in wonder at the latticed hats that seemed to erupt from their hair.

In short, you could see and hear and smell the entire history of your people in walking the three blocks from Park to Lenox. You could almost taste it, and you could certainly touch it. In fact, these black people comprehended all of American history to that point, from slavery at the South and the Caribbean to modern industry at the North, from manual labor in the sugar, tobacco, and cotton fields to the factories, and from there to the mental labor required at the journals and magazines—among them, Fire!, The Call, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, and The Crisis, the NAACP house organ edited by W. E. B. Du Bois—that had sprung from this fertile ground, this tectonic collision of historic time zones. They were omni-Americans, as Albert Murray put it, and they still are.

But think about it just for a minute, and that’s the tableau that presents itself almost anywhere you go in this city, even where the past has been paved over too many times to count. Even as bulked up at four lanes and a meridian, Broadway is still Manhattan’s spinal column, rising gradually from below 14th Street on a narrow ridge that was an Indian trail before the Dutch arrived.

The larger America is like that, too. Take the 19th century as the setting, when Turner’s “frontier thesis” was yet to be formulated. In an inversion of Whiggish narratives that recorded inexorable progress toward higher planes of civilization, the most recent episodes in the history of the US were stages of savagery rather than the farthest outposts of polite society—and, as James Fenimore Cooper taught his readers, that savagery was mainly the work of the white men who roamed the margins of settlement. The distant past, before civilization, when hunter-gatherers, renegades, and marauders shared the stage, seemed always within reach, right across the border, in the territories, on the frontier.

But unlike Europe, where Faulkner’s dictum holds more truth, the evidence of the past is rarely monumental in America. For the most part, it’s sedimented, not constructed, except where lost causes require elaborate commemoration—it’s not by accident that the obvious exceptions were carved from the steep sides of mountains. Still, the past is present in real, living time, not as solidified space, for instance in the repeated waves of immigration from places the US has pillaged or conquered or subverted or exploited, by military and other means, especially but not only since 1945, and in the revanchist movements that litter the domestic political landscape, always aiming to reclaim the future by restoring a past that never was, from the John Birch Society to the Tea Party, and, finally, unto our own time, when the project of reinstating patriarchy is one of the more “moderate” goals of the Republican Party—the party, we used to say, of Lincoln.

So is that what I mean when I say America becomes indispensable insofar as it doesn’t behave as other nations do? That you don’t have to dwell in the past as if it’s always present, because no matter where you are in this country, it’s always clearly marked as something from the past, by its lived difference in the present?

It’s a land of extremes, to be sure, where the black and white, either/or of the color line—the problem of the 20th century, Du Bois announced in 1903—is always countermanded by the fact that the people who tread it most carefully also tend to blur its boundaries, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. It’s by now a mere cliche to say that we’re a nation of immigrants, orphans, castaways, a people without a shared origin, language, religion, or folk culture—a mongrel, ragtag collectivity with nothing in common except the urge to offer rival accounts of how this thing we call America came about.

I guess that’s what I mean by indispensable. We’re the nation that comes of nothing, that pieces itself together by drawing on all stages, all lands, all peoples—not to extract value from them, not to master them, but to hear from them, to find ourselves by realizing that without all these others, we, the American people, would be worth nothing.