Kelley quoted Said:
> The great fallacy of Fukuyama's thesis about the end of history, or
> for that matter Huntington's clash of civilisation theory, is that
> both wrongly assume that cultural history is a matter of clear-cut
> boundaries or of beginnings, middles and ends, whereas in fact, the
> cultural- political field is much more an arena of struggle over
> identity, self-definition and projection into the future. They are
> fundamentalists when it comes to fluid, turbulent cultures in constant
> process, trying to impose fixed boundaries and internal rules of order
> where none really can exist. Cultures, specially America's, which is
> in effect an immigrant culture, overlap with others, and one of the
> perhaps unintended consequences of globalisation is the appearance of
> transnational communities of global interests, as in the human rights
> movement, the women's movement, the anti-war movement and so on.
> America is not at all insulated from any of this, but one has to
> excavate beyond the intimidatingly unified surface to see what lies
> beneath, so as to be able to join in that set of disputes, to which
> many of the people of the world are a party. There is hope and
> encouragement to be gained from that view.
Michael Lind's book *Made in Texas* that Ian Murray recently pointed to is very interesting from this perspective. It points to types of capitalist "spirit" differentiated by the degree of psychopathology they embody. It's an approach to "cultural studies" that presupposes the existence of rational grounds on which to base description and evaluation of "identities" and doesn't split them into the ideally good and the demonic bad. A great deal of important diversity lies hidden behind the adjective "American."
Ted