I’m thinking about different facets of why, in American idiom, post- is often interpreted as meaning anti- rather than “after” or beyond."

On American translation of post- to anti-

Basic Idea

Linguistics

In English language, post- has historically, and in dictionaries, just means “after:” it’s a temporal condition, not an opposing relation: postwar, postnatal.

But in political and theoretical discourse, it often has connotations of “against:” postmodernism is seen as not just after modernism, temporally, but is seen as rejecting the claims of modernism, usually specifically modernist universalism.

In the American idiom, the /post-/ prefix is often still temporal, but signifying a rupture in a zero-sum state.

Philosophy

In European thought, philosophers in “post-” schools of thought maintained continuity of thought with what they were “after:” Jacques Derrida’s post-structuralism is not anti-structure but an exploration of structuralist assumptions. But in the U.S., post-structuralism is often equated with anti-truth, as a result of the former’s reduction into anti-structuralism

Culture

American public discourse is basically nothing but opposing binaries: liberal and conservative, and frames progress in terms of rupture rather than continuity, so “post-” becomes a story of breaking free from whatever it is post.

This was especially true during the Cold War, when Continental theory arrived in American academia, when almost all thought was filtered into these lens: liberal and Marxist, realist and relativist.

Loops

Because American readers assume “post-” means “anti-,” Continental theory texts are taught, cited, and mobilized in ways that utilize that reading: when looking for a term to signal their opposition to a thing, American thinkers use “post-,” for example postliberalism.[fn:: Postliberalism is a perhaps interesting case study here, because it was taken up by Europeans who did a similar translation, resulting in using an antagonist thought as structuring thought, which is a demonstration of a certain dynamic of this phenomenon, in which American codes are taken into the European or global code but in doing so limit the code’s potential results to what the American code facilitates.]

This induces a connotative drift in the [[id:8ffcdaaf-748c-4c0a-bb9d-444350785f5d][idiom of A…4943 chars truncated…, producing synthesis. American liberal thought, though its conceptual lineage was in European thought, usually truncated that move: contradiction wasn’t used as generative tension, but a sorting operation.

When looking toward what has made America different than Europe, there’s a few different dynamics that have been clearly identified by different schools of thought, but the idea most relevant here is the Transatlantic cybernetic circuit.

What I mean by that is how the earliest American settlers arrived with a way of life that was compatible with European ways of living; specifically the early settlers of New England arrived with a way of life that was compatible with England: they both had the same political referents: the Bible, English legal code, Anglican and Calvinist doctrine.

In America and Europe, these references were produced into texts: charters, catechisms, sermons. These texts referenced the same foundations, but in different environments and situations.

I’m not doing a good job explaining what I’m thinking of here, but it’s close maybe to the concepts in The American Jeremiad by Sacvan Bercovitch (1978ce), but that’s not quite it. But you’re either in fidelity to the covenants, or you’re in betrayal.

But the idea that American intellectualism and political formations have a drift to dualism is something that’s been diagnosed a few ways in a few frames. Here are some others that come to mind:

• Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955ce)
  • America never had feudalism or aristocratic estates: it was born as a liberal nation.
  • Without deep counter-traditions (monarchism, socialism, aristocraticism) to structure conflict, especially intellectual conflict, everything was an intra-liberal conflict.
• Patrick Wolfe in Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native (1999ce)
  • settler-colonialism is a structure, not an event:
    • its fundamental logic is elimination: excluding the Indigenous, including the settler
  • the system preserves European heterogeneity but eliminates non-European heterogeneity.
• Maurice Duverger in Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1954ce)
  • Duverger’s Law: first-past-the-post voting tends to produce two-party systems
• Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (1835ce)
  • American democracy arises from lack of aristocracy and leads to individualism.
  • cultural style of stance-taking: issues are processed as personal commitments.
  • Tocqueville warned of a tyranny of the majority that comes from this.

So, lack of material structuration derived from epistemic structuration that was translated into a more compressed form, and myths that made these absences feel good, led to the American drift to dualism, might by how I’d say it.