America, Action

These photos of the 1930s and 1940s America are pretty unbelievable: http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.html

...altogether unbelievable, I would say, how much has changed -- how much we've changed.

I've been reading a book called Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederick Jameson. The text is an inquiry into postmodernism as a cultural/historical "period," as product and feature of "postindustrial capitalism" rather than simply an artistic or intellectual "movement." "I have rather meant to offer a periodizing hypothesis..." Jameson writes. It's an audacious method, in a sense: it's predicated on the claim that historical periods can be said to exist at all; that we can say that this set of historically real things and that set of historically real things are, in some essential way, totally insoluble with each other. That what it means to be human has fundamentally changed.

I think about this when I look at these photos -- I think about how different it was to be alive back then; and then I think (as the Marxist would) that this quasi-metaphysical change in the experience of living -- whatever it entails -- was wrought mostly by the making of stuff; that this whole synchronic universe of commodities whirling around us -- the buying and selling, gift-giving and creating -- can't help but touch the lives of everyone and everything for years to come.

What follows is a strong case for persistent engagement with the world -- ie, a case (and I think we all ought to have one) to get out of bed in the morning. If our world is ultimately material in its character, then the shift from the America of these old photos to the America of today happened because people chose to act, to think, to make. That fact alone is pretty extraordinary, if you think about it in the right way: we pulled ourselves up and out in history, from there to here, by acting.