Trying to make sense of the country I spent two weeks living and exploring (predominantly on foot), the over whelming sense was their dependence on the prosthetic edict, ' I can, therefore I am ' (Celia Lury, 1998, Prosthetic Culture). Techno-phillia is enacted in all areas of life: from the historically grounded can do spirit of the pioneers exhibited by the a friend's rebuilding of a rented apartment, to the ubiquitous machinery an metal that makes up the built environment, and most abruptly - for someone coming from England - the sovereignty and commodification of health.
Even a country so dependent and enamoured with the use of hydro carbons (I'm thinking here the ridiculously over-powered cars and trucks), the green issue is beginning to gain traction - in New York at least. Posters on the subway urge more responsible use of utilities and resources, there are recycling bins on the streets and hybrid technology public transport. Yet given the US's ability to marginalise immigrant minorities (I never saw anyone work in kitchen who wasn't Mexican) it is no surprise that this push to go green has created an underclass of recyclers who have been quick to try and capitalise on scant rewards for recyclable commodities. In an effort to supplement poor wages many of the city's poor sort plastic bottles from rubbish bins and sacks, although this might seem simply a case of the shock of the real int he west, it also seems to me to create the impression amongst other New Yorkers that the rag pickers are providing something akin to a service, and in a society so dominated by spectacular corporate service provision, this 'provision' both takes the weight of responsibility off most consumers and, by virtue of the recycler's marginalization, seemed to create a (albeit small) stigma attached to the act of recycling.
This contradiction arising out of the of the ultra-commodifcation of social functions was no more apparent than in the healthcare system. A mentality described in Adam Curtis's 2007 documentary The Trap, of self medication and self normalisation that arose out of the social quantification that arose out of the Cold War is as ubiquitous as ever. Having a drink with some friends the sedative Xanax came up in conversation, most having used it and one person even admitting "I have at least one panic attack a month". I can't speak for the reasons or solution for this, but it was striking to see the ease with which they would self medicate, both the expectation that they would and that self-medication is the normal solution rather than changing lifestyle, and that the flipancy with which high strength drugs were discussed and used for health reasons: this wasn't (ostensibly at least) recreational drug use in spite of its hallucinogenic effects.
Seeing the ultra privatised healthcare system in this light could just be a culture-shock, but the commodification of drugs clearly equalised these products with all others. Here was one of the most ironic contradictions, cigarettes and beer on sale in pharmacies, more appropriately called drug stores in the U.S. The cause of illness may be on sale here but helpfully the 'cure' is on sale here too. on the face of it, you could just see this as cynical profiteering, but clearly pioneer problem solving ethic is manifesting itself again. If there's a problem, we will fix it. A commodity based society fits very well with a prosthetic sensibility (where each individual affects their environment and identity by what they can do, rather than accepting both as a result of a synthesis of various contextual factors) allowing the creation of identity within easily purchasable access. So while free choice is the underlying mantra of our epoch of capitalism, with all its pit falls, the parallel ideology of the prosthetic ideology 'I can, therefore I am" means that problems are solvable, with the addition of the right product, in the drug store these are helpfully a few aisles away from each other.
My Lasting impression of America is of a country who's deep-seated patriotism is rooted in a belief in the ability to manually and individually chose and make their society and culture. Industry, engineering and production are visibly evident and appreciated in the built environment.
It seems that the palpable paranoia (try watch American TV and avoid the adverts for criminal investigation training) towards anything or anyone who might threaten the American way of life comes from this idea that identity (cultural, social and personal) are created by prosthetic action and creation rather than an intrinsic result of a synthetic interweaving of this prosthetic sense and cultural, geological, historical etc inputs which is seen in the French idea of Terroir. The American identity is a collage of individual constructs, but as a purely human construct, anyone could (in theory) build their culture over it, performing the same action that formed the cultural identity of the USA, but the fear is that it would erase and destroy American society in the process. What this mentality forgets, and this is evident in the furore surrounding the building of a muslim community centre near the Ground Zero site, is that cultural identity is based on something much more like the French idea of Terroir. Although US history is relatively short and it is a country which has built its identity in a fairly short space of time, its way of life does not only hang on the built environment and objects that fill it.
