Who ever said research had to be boring?

Exploring a concept can be an interesting and amusing endeavor. You can go about it in a thousand ways.

You could play something like the arithmetician and deal purely in abstractions, removed conceptual realms—trying always, of course, to remain ‘objective’.

You could be creative—an artist—play the Deleuzian and explore movements, discourses, colors, sounds, intensities becoming concepts.

You could be an early Platonist, treat movements and intensities as if they manifested and referred back to old concepts, rigidifying them, proving them, attempting to convert your ‘findings’ into law.

You could be a skeptic, distrust everything.

Etc., etc…

Our method most resembles the second form aforementioned. The questions we’re asking, as Sarah said, are designed to be as open ended as possible. The interviewee may take the questions wherever s/he wants to go with them.

Sarah also mentioned a few ‘disclaimers’ in our introduction—that we acknowledge the limitations of our scope. Attempting to ‘capture the essence’ of anything can quickly become a matter of conceptual violence—dogmatism. Who, really, can claim to be objective in capturing essences? In defining them? Against what measure is one expression judged to be more accurate than another?

What happens if essence is nothing but a metaphor? Well, in this case, we weave a quilt of metaphors. We make something out of them. Stitch them into a film. Then they have an effect, become something else, presumably. Maybe you take a piece and run with it.

Maybe we create an image that moves, that is itself moved and moving. Film is a great medium for that, especially for traveling research (at least as far as we're concerned).

So far, we’re getting pieces of America, sound bytes, gestures, responses to our questions coming in myriad forms. The farther we go, the more people we talk to, the stranger this idea of 'Americanness' becomes—and it’s fascinating. The word is not becoming meaningless, despite that we no longer can hold onto any stable definitions, like children hanging onto our mothers’ skirts. The concept is forming itself, becoming deeper and richer.

You can see it in people’s eyes. You can see them thinking. Sure, you can see some of them regurgitating ideas that have been sanitized and popularized, made palatable and sweet. But you can also see people forming very intricate ideas, problematizing them, on the spot, with these eyes, these honest seeming eyes.

It's amazing how you can get people to talk. You can approach a random person on the street and ask them if they’d like to answer a few questions and most of them are more than willing to.

A frequent answer we've been receiving from Americans and foreigners alike is that Americans tend to be quite hospitable and friendly. Perhaps the fact that almost everyone we have asked to interview has allowed us to attests to that. Or perhaps we have just encountered so much 'Southern hospitality' down here in the Southeast that we are beginning to make assumptions about the whole of America—tisk, tisk.

We'll see what things look like further West.

-Alex