Americans Dream in Mythology (Cultural Journalism)

In 2007, Apple Computers released a pocket-sized box that contained the logical culmination of a technological revolution that began in the middle of the twentieth century when IBM terrified the world with its room-sized calculating machines, or possibly even earlier with the inventions of the telephone, the gramophone, and the daguerreotype. The iPhone incorporates all the technology that has come to define the modern world including wireless cellphones, microscopic cameras, portable MP3 players, GPS tracking, and complete access to the Internet. Across the globe, it has been heralded as an outstanding technological feat. With its breadth of utility and unbeatable mobility, it surely represents an exciting step forward in the communicative history of humanity. But for America, it means so much more. Invested in the monochromatic body of the little box of magic is the entire American sense of identity, for the iPhone is a concrete signifier for the signified abstraction which is the American Dream.

Though the ideas of success and happiness coming through honest hard work and good decision making is, in essence, little more than the spirit of capitalism recognizable as the rhetoric of any industrial economy, we Americans have somehow managed to latch on to the absurd belief that in its truest essence, it is represented only in America, the land of the free, the land blessed by God. Antecedent to all other values is the ever-present assumption that America is the land of opportunity, where one can find or create her fortune, or more importantly, create herself. While on the surface, the American Dream seems to be an economic ideal, it is in actuality a social ideal: the conglomerate synthesis of many different social mythologies. In order to properly understand it as an historically, it must be considered within the contexts of the other mythologies that supposedly gave rise to it: the myth of the pilgrims fleeing England in order to escape religious persecution, the myth of America as ‘the melting pot of the world’, the myth of a land free from social hierarchy, where democracy is real and freedom and equality paradoxically co-exist side by side, both in the fullest sense of the word. Each of these myths, like the melting pot that the country is supposed to be, merged together into the distortedly self-satisfied (even narcissistic) image of the self-made man. The American is unprejudiced, she considers all sources of input. The American is a hybrid, he has grandparents from Ireland, Germany, Sicily and Africa. The American is democratic, she always puts the community first; a success for her neighbors is a success for herself. The American is fiercely independent. Riding the Oregon Trail within a caravan of hundreds, he will ultimately build his homestead with his own two hands and create his own little Garden of Eden for just his family and himself, then invite a neighbor over for a beer in good natured fraternity. The American is thrifty, she knows how to utilize all tools at her disposal. But mostly, the American is compassionate and honest. He may occasionally fall on hard times, but his moral resolve to never interfere with his neighbor and always lend a helping hand, will never bend, never sway, for honesty is the true and good American way.

In the twenty-first century, we are experiencing a twofold resurgence of democracy unlike any previously seen in civilization. One is real, the other exists only echoing off the walls of an utterly hollow rhetoric. After September 11th, democracy became for American foreign policy the holy cross under which all Crusades were justifiable. It is a democracy mass-produced and exported in the likeness of that which is practiced at home in the land of the American Dream - that is, mostly idealized and imagined. Conversely, right around the same time as the terrorist attacks ushered in a functionally new world of diplomacy, the Internet experienced a massive expansion of capabilities that ironically ushered in a vastly more unique world order with a structure unlike anything previously seen in the twentieth century. Online communities based on equal access to read and submit information in the realms of everything from news (as in blogs), to factual information (like Wikipedia), to the advertisement of self (like with Myspace or Facebook) have proven to be the beginning of a democratic age, less in the spirit of the American Constitution as in the seemingly more equal sense of Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes” theory. Certainly, the irony here is at a time when American Dream rhetoric has spread beyond the dime novels of Horatio Alger, and beyond the latent unconscious of the average native-born citizen to the inappropriate domain of foreign policy, a substantiated version of that very idea is growing at home for perhaps the first time. And of course to cap the irony, that same government so concerned with democracy elsewhere is worried that there is no way to govern or monitor the free actions of the Internet’s users.

So how does this all relate to the iPhone? The key begins in the wireless access to the Internet. This is the melting pot of democracy as we have always prided ourselves: equal access and equal opportunity, representing the utilization of the best the world has to offer. And all at your fingertips! But moving deeper than that is the myth of the self-made man, for it’s not the presence of the melting pot that makes the American Dream possible, but the intelligent application of it by an individual, in order to become something unique and wonderful, to truly be as one dreams. Within the iPhone is the database of everything the modern citizen holds sacred, pure customization. In your pocket at any given moment are: all of your favorite pictures of all of your best friends, your entire music collection, phone numbers of everyone you know with instant text messaging capabilities, your e-mail account, your favorite videos, your appointment planner, your alarm clock, the saved messages of all the most important correspondences of the last few months, in short, your entire life. But the signifier extends even further, for with the iPhone comes the possibility of total immersion in the cultural units we have become used to identifying ourselves with. With a set of headphones, we can seal off the noise and our awareness of the world around us and walk down the street listening to all of our favorite songs, watch movies, and even talk to friends without having to open our mouths. In short, like the iPhone’s music-focused predecessor, the iPod, we have developed a means by which we can seal ourselves off in a pod that contains all of our favorite things, from which we need not ever be disturbed. And yet at the same time, we are always completely connected, in unfettered instant communication with all people and information should we so desire the contact. Simultaneously, the iPhone holds us in our own customized homestead and absolutely engaged in the community around. The freedom to be and do whatever we want (within our pod) and yet the democracy of equal access for anyone within the (now global) community. This truly is the American Dream reimagined, even improved, because it fits so easily in a pocket.

The iPhone, of course, wasn’t invented with the American Dream in mind. My usage of it as a symbol doesn’t presuppose any type of causality or intention. It simply came about as a technological inevitability that happened to correspond to a preexisting ideology. But therein lies an important insight into the way by which a given sign becomes a signifier of an array of cultural signifieds: assumed correlation through an understanding of a people. “Wine is felt by the French nation to be a possession which is its very own.” (Barthes 58) But of course, it is not. Wine is drunk in every country of the world by every people of the world (depending on religious regulations). But still it is felt by the French to be their own because French ritual has come to incorporate it as a given, and it corresponds to a Frenchman’s idealized conception of his own values. The Frenchman is the only national on Earth who gets drunk from wine as a consequence, not an intention: this is a conception that must be perpetuated because, particularly in a globalized democratic age, there is such an extensive awareness of different peoples with seemingly incredibly similar lifestyles that it is all that is to be done to preserve some sort of identity. The Frenchman must perpetuate his myths because it’s the only way to maintain any assumed ‘meaning’ in the word ‘Frenchman’. So too does this govern the behavior of the American. Her country invented democracy and is the only true land of opportunity the world over. With each new discovery or invention by one of her countrymen comes the fulfillment of the prophesy of the American Dream. It is a desperate clinging to a false sense of exceptionalism that conveniently overlooks the general nature of the now global marriage of technology and capitalism, a growing force entirely reliant on scientific cooperation and borderless (politically, that it) technological incrementalism.

So myth perpetuates itself. Once established in the unconscious of an inherited self-conception, the American Dream is found manifest in everything we do. And though the myth itself is idealized, it never exists in a specific idealized form. Not only because the heights of idealism can never be reached, but mostly because it means something different to every citizen. Each person engages in his own dialogue with the reality he has witnessed in his lifetime, and forges an assumed meaning for the term that it must contain as the logical culmination of history. The iPhone was my symbol because of what I understand America to have meant in the past (hence my historical description), to mean in the present (hence my current foreign policy discussion), and to mean to me personally. I think of the significant (to me) objects within her borders and I consider my relationship to them and the relationship I subjectively perceive between my compatriots and those objects, and then I discover correlations. The web widens and complexifies, but it all begins with an origin in perspective: my own. Inevitably, those correlations probably say more about me as a critic than any (debatably) objective reality, but like Barthes with his look at wine, I can only assume my assignment of meaning is, as the product of the indoctrinating cultural atmosphere that composed my upbringing, the clearest view we are going to find. First and foremost, this raises the question of validity and what constitutes it. If an American childhood shaped my worldview in a specific way and I subsequently use that view to look at America herself, then is that not the closest we can get to a description of the way in which meaning has been assigned to a certain culture at a specific time, bearing in mind that it is both fluid and can be considered only in discourse, an active dialogue? Or does this approach only yield my autobiography, having nothing to do with America, for American culture can only be discussed in contrast to non-American cultures?

In order to find a structuralist answer to those questions, it might be useful to return to Barthes’ discussion of wine. In his conclusion, he states “the mythology of wine can in fact help us to understand the usual ambiguity of our daily lives.” (Barthes 61) Then he takes the discussion into a broader economic arena saying, “it is no less true that its production is deeply involved in French capitalism…and the characteristic of our current alienation is precisely that wine cannot be an unalloyedly blissful substance.” (Ibid) My interpretation of this is that it is little more than a call to consider the larger picture. It is to look through the accepted fact of our daily (supposedly cultural) mythologies and recognize the essential structures of social, political, and economic life that serve as the preconditions for life to proceed as it does. What social structure (i.e. demand, ritualistic method of social interaction) allows for the production of iPhones? What economic system is supported by this? How is it produced? What role do political relations have, and who benefits by the assumption that the iPhone is just the latest manifestation of the success of the American dream? These are the sorts of questions the method hopes to elicit, allowing readers to answer for themselves.

But the first question must inevitably be, is there really any relation between the iPhone and the American Dream and supposing there is (albeit if only an allegorical one) what exactly does that reveal about the Dream itself and how has it shaped the lives of the Americans who are raised with it as given? Statistically, “the rate of depression is doubling every 20 years and, according to a Harvard Medical Center study, the rate of childhood depression is increasing by 23% a year.” And according to the sociologist Robert Putnam, American civic involvement, contact with one’s neighbors, and trust in the government are all statistically at the lowest they have ever been. (Putnam 68) In fact just about every statistic I have ever seen has suggested that in the time of the highest standard of living (now), with the highest degrees of consumption and by far the most options of entertainment, Americans feel steadily increasing bouts of depression, alienation, isolation, and general unhappiness. What better symbol of that than the iPhone, with which it is possible to avoid contact with any and all others, communicate with friends without opening one’s mouth, and surround oneself with one’s favorite songs, videos, pictures, and games, to the exclusion of the real world which is steadily being relegated more and more to the role of background noise? As far as democracy is concerned, civic engagement and trust in the government are at their lowest points since the Declaration of Independence. What sort of democracy can survive conditions such as those?

If the iPhone truly signifies the American Dream, then surely it must do so for the good and bad. Freedom and equality, isolation and disconnect within a sea of communication; were these all present in Horatio Alger’s 1860s novels or has something changed? If we analyze the old idealized Dream bearing in mind the negative results we have witnessed in the present day, we discover that there too is the same underlying solipsism that marks the post-9/11 era. The American mantra of Manifest Destiny is wrought full of isolation of the self, escaping civilized society in order to be alone with your favorite things, to pursue a fortune in the classical capitalist sense. Why else, but so you and you alone can be rich. After all, you deserve it! You’ve worked for it. So perhaps the American Dream has been an egocentric form of escapism all along. But that really doesn’t matter too much, because once again, it was an ideology, not a concrete reality, and at the time, staunch individualism wasn’t possible in the way it is today, simply due to what was necessary for survival. A community relied on cooperation and there weren’t so many material ways by which to fashion oneself unique as there are today. Perhaps the problem then is not so much the need to be an individual so much as the extent to which that is possible now, or else the method by which we now define individuality. As the main character of the film High Fidelity observes, “It’s what you like, not what you are like” that really counts these days. How often is the modern teenager described not so much by the values she holds closest to her heart, but instead by her favorite bands and favorite movies?

And suddenly something very important becomes a factor: the iPhone isn’t just an American export. Cellphones and iPods, digital cameras and text messaging are the cultural norms all across the developed world. And while a great deal of pop culture does originate in the US, global communication has reached a point such that origins become nearly arbitrary. Genres, instead have taken their place. In that way, and especially thanks to global connection of the Internet, a young man in Ohio could feel more akin to the fans of a death metal band out of Germany than his own next-door neighbors. What was once a cultural production closely tied to an abstract concept of American-ness is now simply the structure of an increasingly connected global sense of material culture. But still the American Dream of individual expression, the creation of the greatest self in a democratic system by utilizing the tool available, making one’s own fortune, is all too apparent in the mentality. Perhaps then, it should simply be called what it is: common materialism. The new frontier is the avant-garde of creativity and the new homesteader is either the entrepreneurial capitalist or fashion connoisseur who forged his identity, and subsequently his role in society, through the incorporation of knowledge of various elements of culture: literature, musicians, visual artists, and popular philosophical opinions. At this point, there’s nothing remotely ‘American’ about the iPhone as a cultural sign. It’s the end result of a dialogue that has taken place between the worldviews of the citizens of every country and has been voluntarily accepted as the new, democratic means by which to identify the self. After all, the only two questions that have ever really been asked since the dawn of time are “Who am I?” and “How then shall I live?” The Internet represents the culmination of all the answers that have ever been given to those questions poured together into a massive primordial pool of possibilities. With equal access comes democracy. With equal opportunity for utilization comes freedom. But as far as the actual answers are concerned, once again, it’s every man for himself. That, of course, is a very alienating prospect.

It is just that alienation that points to the larger structure of how cultural signifiers now work in an age that is swiftly rendering national identity and economic class moot. The latter has now been relegated to a subset of fashion which is based on price but no longer universally recognized as the height of desirability. There was once a time when the wealthiest controlled the means of production and therefore, all the other classes of society. However, with this new democratization of information, a massive shift in ideology is taking place. Statistically, Americans are taking lower paying jobs in order to engage themselves in work that is more satisfying, contributes more directly to their happiness. The myth of “money buying happiness” has been effectively debunked and now, after centuries of assuming the accumulating of wealth to be the only viable pursuit in life, an entire population is reassessing its values. The Internet now provides all who are interested with a complete education in history, art, ideas, ideologies, etc. and so with every possibility hypothetically at their fingertips, cultural mythologies are no longer of any value. Travel is easier and cheaper than ever before. Customs from every corner of the world can be learned and adopted instantaneously. Religious ideologies and philosophical beliefs can all be read and considered by anyone and everyone, and so origins and associations hold less significance than ever in history. We are witnessing the effective death of tribalism and the rise of individual navigation/incorporation of the assimilated history of the world. Naturally, everything I’ve noted in this paragraph is an exaggeration and an anticipation, which by no means have effected every human being or necessarily even touched every human being. But it is the general trend that seems to be rising and it must determine how we read individual cultures in the future within an electronically unified world.

With a well-rounded education, even a self governed one, the language of culture begins to take on the shape of a spider web, progressively filling in gaps and linking together knowledge of the world as it is and has been, and all the various worldviews that have been put forth. With education comes an understanding of the specific relevance of each unit of cultural information, not unlike Foucault’s concept of discourse: the more you learn, the more emphatic the context and self-awareness of each piece of information becomes. By that I mean that art and ideas throughout history are never produced in a vacuum and are informed by both their own times and their authors’ understanding of the infinitely expanding fabric of all that has come before and all that is taking place in simultaneity. This creates a growing sense of cohesion of the history of human thought and the interrelatedness of everything. Armed with a loose understanding of what has been and what it has been interpreted as meaning, it is then the individual’s task to pick his lifestyle and means of engagement with the surrounding world according to what he himself has deemed best. This engagement follows a Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis development, except the antitheses have become so prevalent and contradictory that terms like True or Best have been rendered mostly meaningless. It seems there once was a time when students were taught the unquestioned truth, but now there is such a global awareness of conflicting possibilities, approaches to reality, that Reality itself has become something of a conglomerate candy store, or maybe even the iPod itself, where you can choose a song or a world view to fit your mood. Once again, to each his own, but by now the creation of the self is, like the original American Dream, marked by study and work, intelligent contemplation, and mostly, calculation. The language of culture is mostly a weighing of the significance of varyingly interpreted symbols and the calculated navigation of them within the presentation of self in an effort to either (naively) define the self according to the precedents of others, or to manipulate the rules in order to get ahead as per the ideology of gain – that is, capitalism.

To return, finally, to my original point, the materialist’s methodology of self-definition by means of the art and music of other people, can best be seen in the compact pocket-sized iPhone, for it seems the iPhone fully understands the candy store nature of ideology and art, and has no qualms with housing antithetical bits of information. A user can load it up with all of their favorite cultural units, then immerse herself in it like a psychological Garden of Eden. But of course, not everybody owns an iPhone, and not everybody listens to music. Definition of the self through publicly recognized artistic media is a particularly materialist approach to life, and though it is the growing trend across the world, it is by no means the universal rule of human behavior. However, it is the natural evolution of the American Dream, and in a way, it exists as such as the American Dream could only dream of existing. But what the iPhone does more than anything is point to a larger structure of identification through adoption. Historically, it was the adoption of one’s inherited tribal myths. In modernity, it shall continue to be mythological, for individual meaning is found only somewhere between consensus and subjectivity, but it will no longer come through blood, but instead through the navigation of the sea of the world’s heritage.
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
　
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. (City of publication unknown): Hill and Wang, 1972.
Putnam, Robert, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital.” Journal of Democracy 6:1, Jan 1995, pp. 65-78.