how
old is the american dream?
Noone can remember when the american dream was
conceived, when it started. Hardly can anyone know. That happens to be yet
another manifestation of the epistemological quandary. A possible sense of
frustration--annoyment--may be ascribed to what Arendt classifies as the
western civilization predicament:
The curious fact that
the men of the revolutions were prompted into their desperate search for an
absolute the very moment they had been forced to act might well be, at least
partly, influenced by the age-old thought-customs of Western men, according to
which each completely new beginning needs an absolute from which it springs and
by which it is ‘explained’. (On Revolution 198)
This insight into the perception of an absolute as a
cultural construct is eerily elusive in its potentially ambiguous referencing
of pronouns and, hence, possibly misleading understanding of the relationship
between the subject, the object, and the predicate of the sentence. Needless to
say, such quirky syntax reflects part of the uncertainty characterizing
multifarious linguistic socioscape of a babylonian culture of today.
That both the implied statement about cultural
cacophony and the overtly raised question about the need and want to know where
the beginnings are and what the source is sound too familiar to the ear of a
denizen of contemporary culture is self-evident. We are living in a culture
that does not tolerate unconquered (or, unconquerable) epistemological zones.
If it accepts their existence, it does so only to transform--hack--them into
maneuvering space for oppressive socio-political control. Contemporary cultural
realities are averse to silence. Silence is being under a constant threat of
commoditization--of becoming a brand selling disguised muteness. We don’t buy
it.
Contemporary
cultural realities tend to impose a model of thinking based on infinitely
dumbing urge to explicate, explain, instruct, formalize, banalize. It is a culture of vagaries that absurdly
combines inclinations toward rigidity and illogicalities, a culture that, while
detailing, does not celebrate clarity. If it seemingly refrains
from the mode of perception crudely dulling the edge of critical thinking, it
does so not to provide an individual with space for either exploration or
contentment with the experience of the limit in diverse spheres that
characterize the human, but to advance the possibility to distract, bewilder,
and pollute--hack. We don’t buy it.
The bitter-sweet truth about blindness pertinent to
such mindlessly orgiastic affinity for dominance and control is that
manipulation, falsified power, and bewilderment are but manifestations of
futile attempts at omnipotence--instances of (self)dissolving noise. This,
among other things, concerns a category mistake Arendt points out in relation
to the development of the French Revolution, and can be contextualized within
contemporary situations, as well. Namely, she rightly indicates the inversion
of the relationship between the social and the political. She demonstrates the
meaning of the dislocation of the role of oppression as a consequence, not a
cause, of poverty and other social ills that galvanized the revolutionary
impetus in the France of 1789. The idea that oppression and violence ensue from
economic inequities--not vice versa--determined the course of the French
Revolution. No less was it instrumental in framing cultural climate to be
further integrated into the socioscape during the centuries to follow.
Nowadays, we are no strangers to the fruits of such
masterminding. No wonder revolutions are associated with severe reductionism in
understanding of the public and the private. More precisely, both the French
Revolution and the American Revolution practically abandoned the idea about
citizens’ participation in the public affairs as the end of the revolution.
Instead, it was pursuit of prosperity that was accepted as a major
revolutionary demand. Citizens became merely individuals (interestingly, void
of individuality) -- no masks, no hypocrisy, no role play -- whereas
politicians assumed the properties of professionals, experts, businessmen
focused on self-interest and wealth, drunk on a delusional sensation of power. Hannah
Arendt:
The
trouble lies in the lack of public spaces to which people at large would have
entrance and from which an élite could be selected, or rather, where it could
select itself. The trouble, in other words, is that politics has become a
profession and a career, and that the ‘élite’ therefore is being chosen
according to standards and criteria which are themselves profoundly
unpolitical. (On Revolution 269-270)
By extension, this demarcates a vehement offense to
the concept of freedom. Hannah Arendt: “Freedom and power have parted company,
and the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with
government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun” (On Revolution
128).
Such is Arendt’s portrayal of history and geography
out of joints, and “under the pressure of wealth” (On Revolution 129). The
world featuring “a society intent upon affluence and consumption” (On
Revolution 129) is looking for the mirror image on the faces of its
dwellers – the image that subverts the presumption that since “the end of
revolution and the introduction of constitutional government spelled the end of
public freedom” (On Revolution 125), it does not follow that pursuing to
end the revolution should be desirable. Arendt is being provocative. She, too,
is a modern reader. Her text provides one with the opportunity to learn. To
learn to…well, read. Do we trust each and every syntagm constitutive of the
questions asked and statements made in this book characterized by vibrant
thought and abounding in invigorating energies? Certainly not.
For that reason, one should time and again revisit
and rediscover the wonders of questions and statements and ask/state every time,
while finetuning the linguistic content to the sound of the moment. At this
point, one is prone to ask how relevant the genuine version of the American
Dream is, how significant the core of revolution, when the dwellers of the
modern world bear witness to a global exodus. Above all, how almost universal
the symbolic of the wandering Jew is (or, wandering rocks, for that matter),
hybridized in the conversation between Stephen and Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
One would like to know.
