A_Lesson_in_History__the_Revolutionary_War

A Lesson in History: The Revolutionary War England’s loss of the colonies in the Revolutionary War is a historically semantic matter that may or may not have been due to calculative reprisal in the stability of their once great Empire. America’s victory, however, is almost as certain as her blood is blue. Concomitant with its triumph is an insidious compilation of discursive practices that not only galvanized the victory of our founding fathers, but also retroactively posits America’s liberal democracy as the center of civilization and the “end of history”. In other words, America realized her victory with “thought” and did so in a way that ontologically prefigures horrific violence with existence so long as those agents remain indifferent to the metanarratives produced by “thought”. The metanarrative, or “end of history” discourse, situates Asia at the beginning; confined in permanent barbarism, and America as the apex of civilization. This metaphysics (thought) of the Occident (“Western thought”) is manifest in America’s victorious birth while uniquely establishing framework for ensuing violence From the beginning, the Occident’s (“Western”) panoptic view of infant America as "uninformed terra incognita" was and is a primary enabling notion in instrumentalist and technological thinking. As a permanent appendage of Europe, American deputies of democracy engaged in the same rhetoric of improvement as their English mother. As Spanos cites, America was "either self-doomed or appealing to the European to save them from themselves by way of imposing his peace on their wasteful strife." So, instead of asking “is it cool to destroy this new land”, linear history implicitly uses the guise of sociology to calculate America's birth and development—society is here and your deaths and enslavement are demographical numbers! Along these terms of Enlightenments' tropisms, unimproved space is seen as "darkness", not in a savage sense, but a "knowable and usable unknown." This is the same same relationship of the Roman imperial model: the civilized Metropolis--the City as a spatial, moral, and barometric center--and the amorphous periphery that must be colonized in the name of imperial Truth. The significant demarcation in America’s contribution to the metanarrative’s Central Circle is the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights. The rhetoric used to justify America’s hegemony is not granting the free society it claims, but rather provides an engineered re-representation of what it means to be human. Through these discursive embellishments, America was able to establish a totalizing Identity necessary for its fulfillment as the “end of history”. America's addiction to national exceptionalism (Identity production) is a discursive practice largely responsible for victory over England in the Revolutionary War. Regardless if England "chose to lose", hegemonic end-of-history discourse reconstellates English loss into America’s aggrandized fulfillment of the metanarrative. More importantly, this very discourse permits the violence that comprised her victory as "remedial mistakes". As Spanos argues, "like de Tocqueville's characteristic Universalist representation of the extermination of the Native Americans at the beginning of American history, obliterated the actuality of that radically contradictory event or reduced it to the status of an accident--a "remedialble" mistake--at the "end of this history". From the puritans divinely ordained “errand in the wilderness” to the present day situation, history has ontologically accommodated mass genocide and endless violence into the continuum of space and time itself. America's emergence as an autonomous government was a historically specific transformation of thinking informed by imperial logos. Its origins are antiquated Roman provenance that sees the world as a compartmentalized space—a picture. It was clear to Americans far before the first continental congress what the world should look like. In Heideggerian analyses, Occidental imperialism was transmuted by America’s advent that rendered previous incalculability as an understandable "world picture". Scrutiny of the picture is a mode of inquiry which orients the subject in an Archimedean relation to the object of its knowledge, (The Archimedean relation has to do with maintaining a constant distance between ‘a’ and ‘b’) in a way that would domesticate and pacify difference. Essentially, this form of metaphysics is imperialism: in assuming that Identity is the precondition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around. As Heideggar writes, “What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.” Further in Heideggerian terms, America's beginning appears as a global telos--a promised historical fulfillment; that "came to be seen as Pax Metaphysica: the colonization of the errant mind of humanity at large by a banal and banalizing thinking that has reduced everything, including human beings, to "standing [or disposable] reserve.'" Symptoms of instrumentalist thinking are evident in all areas of America's emergence, ranging from political reasoning (declaration of independence and articles of confederation—a laundry list of complaints promoting an optimal society) to economic and social constituencies (enslavement, Native genocide, taxation, etc). What this means, for the purpose of the topic, is that opposition to American hegemony is required to think in the same discursive terms that enabled American hegemony, "insofar as they remain indifferent to the ontological grounds of its sociopolitical practices." In other words, the emergence of America and its technological thinking, as a fulfillment of European metanarratives, has tacitly silenced voices outside of democracy. England’s history has always already been preemptively assimilated into America’s “picture” of what the world looks like.—as a domesticated monarchy frozen in time, serving no purpose but to provide a stepping stone for global democracy Interestingly enough, the individual savvy to this enigmatic junction between Western philosophy and imperialism is not damned to eternal marginalization. Although politically displaced and silenced, the thinker's ontological exile creates an irreconcilable contradiction in technological thought's "Truth", albeit tacit. In the interregnum of Americanization, "the primary task of the marginalized intellectual is the rethinking of thinking itself." America's will to remember its birth contains latent instructions that make a seemingly impossible task possible. The first step in the rethinking of thought is to think positive of the negative sublation; to think positively of the nonbeing. When quantitative nomenclature shifts to qualitative, the calculable becomes incalculable and light is shed on the nonbeing of technological discourse. As Heidegger writes, “This coming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around things everywhere when man has been transformed into subjectum and the world into picture.” William Spanos 2000 (Ph.D. and English/Comparative Literature professor at University of New York and Binghamton University, America’s Shadow. An Anatomy of Empire. Published by the University of Minnesota Press.)