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.