Deconstructionism and the American Recession

When a monumental economic recession overtakes a materialistic, consumerist

society, it is unavoidable that the dialects and forms of textuality which constitute the
societys collective conscious and unconscious mind will scatter in many directions.
America in 2013 is certainly no exception. What Roland Barthes calls mythologies
have undergone a rapid turn-over marks of coherence and cohesiveness are no longer
legible, talk and texts are fractured by changing demographics and dwindling
demographic sectors. It is easy to mark, right on the surface, the many ways in which
textuality is turning over in America in 2013 circulation of print magazines and
newspapers is in abeyance, chain bookstores are closing as more print books are
purchased from Internet retailers, the humanities in the American academy have now hit
a new and profound nadir. The Internet, nationally and internationally, is picking up some
of this slack the proliferation of serious pdf repositories has ensured that academics
and auto-didactic intellectuals neednt reach their wits end. But the primary sites in
America for a spectacular play of differences, relational discomfort, Derridas
differance translated into an argot of obfuscation and confusion, are the sources which
have made America notorious (and, at times, uproarious) both to American intellectuals
and to Continental thinkers television, radio, and the aforementioned, now-entropic
newspapers and magazines.
America, on the level of mass media, has been run for many decades under the
aegis and with an ethos of master narrative cohesion, and its disciplined verbal and
textual enactment. The American media master narrative worked skillfully (and more
subtly than has been supposed in Europe) with archetypes separate ones, often, for Red
and Blue America, but with significant and carefully planned overlaps. Take President
Bill and Hilary Rodham Clinton sold to Blue America as a supposed reflection of the
dreams and socio-economic ambitions of the Baby Boomer generation, molded by textual
images crafted to uphold the myth of practical ability married to idealism, with a requisite
freight of acceptable sleaze (Whitewater, Bills affairs); sold to Red America, conversely,
as double-dealing dilettantes, freighted with a latent and useless Southern white-trash
heritage for Bill, betrayed by overused cognitive capacity into a form unacceptable to the
Christian Right and their adjunct good ol boy contingent. Once these two master
narratives were in place, by 1992, all new information following Clintons two White
House terms were molded to both refine and reinforce them. Clintons impeachment,
thus, looked roguish to the Blue and execrable to the Red. America looked at Monica
Lewinsky, bemused or incensed, but not confused.
George W. Bushs inverse archetypal significance was quickly discerned and
enforced. Americas constitutive subjectivity was still intact; plays of difference (and the
various differance signifiers propelling the media textual work of refinement and
reinforcement) were handled competently, professionally, and marketed carefully to
essentially stable demographic sectors. No media-bolstering myths were forced to
change. With Obama came confusion and entropy economic data severe and
demographic-shattering enough that obfuscation became a perceived media necessity,
and with obfuscation the loss of a coherent American media master narrative. As
population decimation began, in all its not-saleable inevitability, the American press
corps could only begin to mutter the consonance of the recession with the Great
Depression of the 1930s. On the other side of this, the Internet had opened a vista
whereby repositories of respectable, bourgeois, middle-of-the-road American textuality
(Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic) could
be challenged publicly and possibly supplanted. These repositories largely adopted a
public position of obliviousness, opting to decoy behind the official and officially
sanctioned (by time, by bourgeois respect of status and textual professionalization)
pronouncements no creator of American myth, no creator of representative American
text knew how to fit the Internet into a comforting, bourgeois-consonant master narrative.
The dissolution of Americas constitutive collective subjectivity into fragments
was already being enacted. The relational status of American textuality had become too
extreme too fast this was differance as disease; and this disease, by 2013, has
reached epidemic proportions, representing too many plays of too many differences to
allow cohesiveness or a comfortably paternal (or at least avuncular) American media
master narrative. Meanwhile, depopulation has continued, but outside the purview of the
American media, who have established a chagrined reciprocity with the American
government. Thats why watching the evening news in 2013 is a frisson for the
perverse mainstream media outlets have established a trifles-only policy, and narrative
cohesion has been transformed, in read copy, into existential non sequiter. If Barnes and
Noble, the largest book chain retail outlet in America, really does close (as has been
reported), the American will-to-power around sanctioned, professionalized, bourgeois
textuality and discourse will have been broken for the time being. National constitutive
subjectivity having dissolved, not in textual-philosophical self-knowledge but in non-
signifying text, Americans will be forced to create their own myths and recreate the tidy,
nuanced mythologies which have been force-fed to them as a recurrence.
The Zeitgeist has deconstructed national myths into jagged shards, and the master
narrative been lost in cacophonous gibberish. Thus, America-signifiers in the press in
2013 are doubly arbitrary both on account of the limitative encumbrances of language,
and on account of a newly chastened and fragmented press corps. Conversely (and, to
some, perversely), this development against narrative mythological cohesion is not
necessarily a negative development for America. The most coherent American
mythologies, up to this point, are not much more than Disneyland, baseball, and Britney
Spears signifiers of innocent or not-innocent consumerism, against cognition and
development of a serious national heritage. If America is ever going to develop past
adolescence, 2013 is as good a time as any to initiate this process. As American
humanities departments shut down under the weight of suddenly bereft rich families and
dope dealers, American intellectuals can begin to know themselves. Deconstructive
thought in America has been known but not practiced all of Derridas maxims
internalized without being understood now we see around us, ineluctably, the arbitrary
nature of the signifier and the dissolution of Americas constitutive subjectivity how
our crisis torques Derridas original significations while also confirming them. America,
in 2013, inhabits the Deconstructive and the serious, responsible deconstructive
impulse is ours to buy and use, if we can find the courage to establish a mature,
disciplined American ethos, around textuality.

Adam Fieled, 2013