# Death-Drive America: On Scott Wilson’s Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age of Supercapitalism



## somnambulist (Feb 24, 2011)

Mark Featherstone

I

Against the Bipolar Culture of Americanism

Despite the explosion of academic study of American political theology in recent times, I hold the view that the best single work on the fundamentalist turn in American politics under Bush II is Arthur Kroker’s (2006) short book Born Again Ideology. However, this view has recently been challenged by the appearance of two books on contemporary America by the British cultural theorist Scott Wilson. What makes Wilson’s books on American supercapitalism, which should really be labeled volumes one and two of a single study of contemporary American political culture, extremely important is that they provide a coherent philosophical and cultural exposition of contemporary America that historicizes the fundamentalist turn under Bush II and presents the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld neoconservative regime as less the driving force behind the turn to fundamentalism and more the political-cultural representation of a tendency in American history that has always been present. Kroker’s book is essential for the same reason. There are, of course, other studies which cover the same ground, including James Morone’s (2003) excellent Hellfire Nation, but none of these offer the same level of philosophical sophistication as the Kroker or Wilson books.

Where Wilson differs from Kroker is in his sustained use of psychoanalysis and cultural theory to explicate the structures of contemporary American society that enables the reader to situate the Bush II regime in a philosophical context comparable to those that exist for the great modern utopias-dystopias of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union (Arendt 1973). In other words, where Kroker’s book delivers the story of American quantum culture and vampyric techno-theology through a close reading of American culture itself, Wilson provides the interpretation of the deep structure of this strange cultural form through a close reading of the poststructuralist tradition in French thought. Although some realist readers may complain that both Kroker and Wilson are hyperbolic in their interpretations of America, I would suggest that it is precisely the surrealistic tone of both writers that makes their books essential, because it is this super-realistic vision that enables them to reveal the madness of contemporary American culture and overcome the tendency to normalization that is present in every society, never mind those where the exception has become the rule. It is for this reason, which often means that those books that are most necessary are paradoxically completely underexposed to commentary and discussion, that what I offer in this paper is a critical analysis of Wilson’s essential theory of American political culture under Bush II.

The first point to note is that Wilson’s books are particularly timely in that they offer us an image of the America of Bush II in its last days. As I read Wilson’s texts America was already consumed with Obama’s utopian talk of change, and it was easy to think that the cruel landscape of what we might call death drive America was about to be swept away forever by at best Obama’s utopian politics, which would apparently see the world united behind a new tolerant brand of Americanism, or at worst McCain’s Bush-lite, which would never be able to hit the highs or lows of the Bush II regime because of the failure or, as Wilson’s books explain, the success of the latter in its black policy drives. But simply because Obama came out of top, and America entered a new utopian phase of thinking about itself as liberator of others through rule of law rather than iron fist, does not mean that Wilson’s books on the cultural politics of the America of Bush II represent irrelevant historical documents. Although it is clear that America has now entered a liberal phase, which as Kroker (2006) explains is the less violent other side of American quantum culture, it is not clear that the social, culture, and psychological complex of Americanism that endlessly propels the land of the free through the bipolar cycle of religious ultra-conservatism and secular liberalism has been completely or even partially recognized. 





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