Last Thoughts on The American Character
Walter A. Davis

I bracket here a number of theoretical issues about the relationship between society and the individual.  For now let the following suffice. The System produces the kind of subjects it requires.   They mirror one another. 

(1) America today defined:  a capitalist corporate christo-fascist society of enforced consumption by commodified beings connected to one another by competitive envy.  The other things we continue to say about ourselves as a nation are by and large the products of historically outmoded ideologies. 

(2) Such a system produces subjects defined by an inner void and desperate attempts to deny that condition.  The catechism of things Americans continue to proclaim about their values and their identity are by and large ideological maneuvers meant to deny this situation.  But it is in what we do not what we say about ourselves that the truth of “The American Character” is revealed.

And thus as the dialectical function of 1 and 2 the following description of “the inner life” of the mass subject in late capitalism.

(3) Projection and evacuation as the necessary mechanism whereby the collective psyche eliminates any doubts about itself.  The prime example of this of course is the Bush Administration’s response to 9-11.  We are good, the other evil.  All inner doubts and fears are evacuated through acts of violent externalization.  Thus, the condition that defines America is no longer neurotic; it has become overtly psychotic.  The denial of reality; or rigid belief in a fantasmatic consciousness projected on reality. (Such as the neocon assurance that democracy would sweep the Middle East once we invaded Iraq.) 

(4) Manic bliss as the self-reference that must be constantly reinforced. Compulsive happy talk and constant reassurance that one is good, healthy, etc.  Christian fundamentalism as the most complete realization of this imperative.  Jesus as the constant presence that voids the mind of everything but the most reductive, simplistic dogmas and the sense of “salvation” that comes from aping them. The abolition of guilt and of an complex inner consciousness in which one could evaluate one’s experience. The death of negativity or negative consciousness.  Affirmation as the only relationship the psyche can have to itself and its society.

(5) Enjoyment without satisfaction.  The imperative of consumption.  Consumption as an eating disorder.  The need to buy, consume to fill an inner emptiness and yet through this only the production of the next new insatiable need. The destruction of desire and the  self-questioning it engenders in favor of an atomization that operates in a stimulus-response manner to addict subjects to consumption.  The psyche in effect becomes pure drives that cannot be resisted.

(6) Panic boredom. The inner void creates a constant anxiety that must be fled because there is nothing left within the subject that would enable it to respond to its situation in any other manner.  All emotions are extreme discharge phenomena of a subject desperately seeking a “happiness” that can only come through a hyperconsciousness constantly assuring itself that it is happy—this being the categorical imperative that the entire society is compelled to affirm.  And thus a vicious circle of subjects “distracted from distraction by distraction” (T.S. Eliot) then fleeing in panic each time the boredom and emptiness of their inner life flits across the empty screen of their consciousness. 

Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11
By Walter A. Davis

The above is a far too brief description of what it means to internalize late capitalism. As are the three definitions I offer in conclusion as descriptions of the future that the System is now constructing in order to perfect itself:

The Political Order—Agamben’s state of exception used to enforce mass conformity. Patriot Acts past and to come as the way of legislating this as the new condition of citizenship.

The Religious Order—The fundamentalist sensibility enforced to compel psyches to render up every possibility of alienation and individuation to a collective Hosannah of mindless obedience.

The Cultural Order—The entertainment industry.  The reduction of art to the production of feel good emotions that become as necessary as drugs and that make it impossible for the mass subject to have any complex experience.  The emotional life becomes (1)the feel good discharge of any “negative” feelings;  and (2)infantalization through the creation of the “Hallmark Card” sensibility as the only structure of feeling of which the mass subject is capable.

In view of the historical condition described above there is only one conclusion that we must all internalize as a challenge to the most painful psychological reflection on our “self.”   As Nietzsche put it: “the desert grows; woe to he who harbors deserts within.” 

Walter A. Davis is an actor, playwright, and cultural critic. His primary theoretical book on theatre is Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American Drama and the Audience (U of Wisconsin P, 1994). His plays include An Evening With JonBenet Ramsey (Authors Choice P, 2004). His most recent work of cultural criticism Death's Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche since 9-11 has just appeared and can be ordered in the U.S. at The U of Michigan Press and in the U.K. at Pluto Press (London)

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