Narcissism and depoliticization: A note on American culture
It is true almost by definition that identity politics is about narcissism. And what is its opposite but the politicization of problems that are otherwise personalized?
The political has been understood in terms of the wrong genre theory. It is not dramatic conflict between actors on a stage so much as changes in the setup or mise-en-scène that count the most. The proper object of politics is, like that of art, the form of life of a society. Not who but what and how.
American society is both highly contentious and thoroughly depoliticized. You cannot criticize most Americans because they think that they are trying to appear in public and just be welcomed and respected, but criticism is attack, as it threatens their right to this respect, as if you were denying them an audience's applause. Most Americans will get very angry if you criticize them. They will hit you or punish you in whatever way they can. Highly educated people will do this; they just wield more sophisticated punishments.
The other problem is that everything is psychological. Hence the obsessions with spirituality and its fixes. The aim of all this is for people to get work done effectively. Normal people mean business, while people who think critically want not to get things done so much as criticize the way things are, with no particular object but the openness to undetermined future changes in the state of things. It fits this that Americans love the arts when available to them as enjoyment (pop music, movies, television), but almost never talk about what these artworks mean.
Politics begins where philosophy did for Plato: Finding things curious and strange, wanting to understand and make sense of our experiences of the world. The art world in the last century shifted its focus from the beautiful to the interesting. After the French Revolution, art in a republican and bourgeois age of equality shifted from a criticism of persons and social subjects to one of the fabric of forms of life as seen and visible, said and sayable. Liberalism (the politics that favors not democracy or liberation but personal liberty) tends to fascism because it personalizes the political. This is a regressive move from the concern for things that matter (res publicae) that define life in a republican society of citizens, to the mere subjectivity or personality of self and persons. Being becomes psychological; to this situation the radical democrats or “communists” respond by politicizing that which is.
Where everything is obvious (the ideology of “common sense”), everything too must be explained. Then all objects of experience are enigmas. We don’t entirely know what is the meaning of Being: who we are, what we are really doing, what is really happening, what we ought to do about it. This is of all things true especially of America today, and nothing could be more hopeful.