Reading/Paper writing: The Queen of America, 2

The Simpsons, Season Three, Episode 2: "Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington" : Lisa satirizes, but also exemplifies, the infantile citizen

Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997. In chapter 1, Prof. Berlant argues that movies and television, which are part of a larger "national knowledge industry," help us to be fat, spoiled babies who choose an utterly fictitious fantasy narrative of the American citizen as a patriotic, nature-loving white men who have no need to worry about poor people and minorities. In one popular trope that is apparently both roasted and exemplified in the above Simpsons episode, we can survive our traumas by visiting Washington, DC and touching something, or fainting and becoming awake again. A final, better variation on the narrative is perhaps the icon of minority group that marches on Washington, exposing the pain of the population by metonymies instead of icons.

A key passage sums up Berlant's argument, which really comes down to a dire warning here about the stories we tell ourselves:

Allegorical thinking helps to provide ways of explaining the relation between individual's lives, the life of the collectivity, and the story of the nation form itself. But much less benign things can be said about the normative deployment of national allegory. n24 As all of the infantile citizens' patriotic essays satirically remind us, the overorganizating image or symbolic tableau emerges politically at certain points of structural crisis, helping to erase the complexities of aggregate national memory and to replace its inevitably rough edges with a magical and consoling way of thinking that can be collectively enunciated and easily manipulated, like a fetish. In this way, for example, patriotism can be equated with proper citizenship. This means that the politcally invested overorganizing image is a kind of public paramnesia, a substitution for traumatic loss or unrepresentable contradiction that marks its own contingency or fictiveness while also radiating the authority of insider knowledge that all euphemisms possess. Extending from these sources of collective imagination, hegemonic allegories of the social appear to confirm inevitabilities and truths where strange combinations of structure and chaos reign behind the screen of the sign.

Other sentences of note:


1. The Theory of Infantile Citizenship.

Audre Lorde took a trip to DC as a child; her parents said it was for patriotism, but really it was a protest of racist school policies.

p. 27 "The the infantile citizen of the United States has appeared in political writing about the nation at least since Tocqueville wrote, in Democracy in America, that while citizens should be encouraged to love the nation the way they do their families and their fathers, democracies can also produce a special form of tyranny that makes citizens like children, infantilized, passive, and overdependent on the 'immense and tutelary power' of the state." n7

p. 29 "When cinematic, literary and televisiual texts fictively represent 'Washington' as 'America,' they theorize the conditions of political subjectivity in the United States and reflect on the popular media's ways of constructing political knowledge in a dialectic of infantile citizenship and cynical reason."

p. 30 "But because in all areas of its mode of production television encounters, engages and represents both the social and political routines of citizenship, and because it underscores the activity of animating and reflecting on as well as simply having a national identity, the problem of generating memory and knowledge in general becomes fraught with issues of national pedagogy, of how to represent what counts as patriotism and what counts as criticism to the public sphere." n12

p. 31 "All of these modes of publicity are normative technologies of citizenship that seek to create proper national subjects and subjectivities."


p. 34 "In contrast to the pilgrimage-to-Washington plots that narrate surviving, remembering, memorializing, and containing the traumatic national past, there is another species of narrative that involves surviving a present moment that feels menacing." (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington)

p. 35 "These examples, I hope, begin to suggest why television's role in constructing the hegemony of the normative nation must be understood as a partial, not a determining, moment in a genealogy of crises about publicity, ideology, and the production of national subjects."

p. 36 "When a given symbolic national body signifies as normal -- straight, white, middle-class, and heterosexual -- hardly anyone asks critical questions about its representativeness. In mass society its iconicity is intensified by commodity culture's marketing of normal personhood as something that places you in the range of what is typical in public and yet is personally unique."

p. 48 "Allegorical thinking helps to provide ways of explaining the relation between individual's lives, the life of the collectivity, and the story of the nation form itself. But much less benign things can be said about the normative deployment of national allegory. n24 As all of the infantile citizens' patriotic essays satirically remind us, the overorganizating image or symbolic tableau emerges politically at certain points of structural crisis, helping to erase the complexities of aggregate national memory and to replace its inevitably rough edges with a magical and consoling way of thinking that can be collectively enunciated and easily manipulated, like a fetish. In this way, for example, patriotism can be equated with proper citizenship. This means that the politcally invested overorganizing image is a kind of public paramnesia, a substitution for traumatic loss or unrepresentable contradiction that marks its own contingency or fictiveness while also radiating the authority of insider knowledge that all euphemisms possess. Extending from these sources of collective imagination, hegemonic allegories of the social appear to confirm inevitabilities and truths where strange combinations of structure and chaos reign behind the screen of the sign."

p. 50 "In other words, the national knowledge industry has produced a specific modality of paramnesia, an incitement to forgetting that leaves simply the patriotic trace, for real and metaphorically infantilized citizens, that confirms that the nation exists and that we are in it."

Raw reading notes:
pp. 26-7 thesis paragraph. 27 p3: the infantile citizen. 28 Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington. p. 29, "they theorize." p 30, "what counts as" p4 31, modes of publicity - p5. 31-2 In Country, 1989. 33. contact will help you grow up, silly 35 Mr. Smith, a different species. p6: "These examples," p7, 36: "iconicity" 40, nation/nature 42 "national conference" -- haha. 45 intimacy - not as common a term as I expected here. 47 the sarcasm tradition. 48 p8, allegory -- fetish. The competent citizen, 50, p9 paramnesia. 41 an unusual use of body: "a disgusting body." 52, p10: "icons" p. 21 privatized citizen ship, Tocquville, 21-22 If... Thinking allegorically. The narrative here is: sent down, return.