Rapaport, Herman. “‘Can You Say Hello?’: Laurie Anderson’s United States. Theatre Journal. 38.3, Performance of Textual History (1986): 339-354.

She suggests that in a postmodern culture scientists are so overspecialized that when it comes to basic questions they are enormously obtuse. No one has noticed that saying ‘hello’ is exactly the same as saying ‘good-bye,’ that even if aliens could read our signs, they would be confused. The fallacy of science: ‘let x = x,’ the ‘united state.’ 340

Indeed, the whole of United States can be read, watched, and listened to as an analysis of how communication is determined by the conditions of postmodern space. In this sense, Anderson undertakes an anthropological project which attempts to define postmodern consciousness in terms of how communication is subordinated to an artistic frame of reference, a framework within which the question of how things are situated in space becomes of greatest importance. 340

Like Brecht, Anderson is not rigid about final versions of her work, and United States is very much a collage of music, words, and pictures which the performer can change at will without really disturbing the overall scheme. 342

Instead of styles which show a capacity for development and growth, the postmodern displays little more than resonance or the power of evocation, what Fredric Jameson considers the commodification of the unconscious…Anderson notices space less as an area in which to be confined than as a surface to be crossed. 343

For Anderson is more receptive (less modernist) to the fact that our conversations and intimate encounters are patterned on a mode of inhabiting space which has much in common with transitional states of consciousness, with a traveling consciousness. Our conversations resemble travel on an expressway, where we are always suddenly encountering signs indicating entrances, exits, continuations, turn offs, detours, mergings, speed signs, and so on. 345

To make telephone calls, therefore, is to establish something close to radar contact with other entities, a notion reflected in Anderson’s fascination with airplanes, missiles, and spacecraft. We are ourselves but vehicles that not only cross space but are monitored; hence the answering machine in “New York Social Life” as a monitoring device which fulfills a primary condition of postmodern communication: to make contact and check in. Conversation itself is superfluous. For in a postmodern world it is through tracking that we affirm our niche in a community always on the move, and our attachments, obligations, and sympathies are only ways of facilitating the kinds of contact needed to perform a map of social relations. Feelings, concerns, issues, and information become what dogs often are for people: excuses to open and close conversations. They are merely “switches.” 346

Performance art itself is but the re-enactment of this mapping or ‘drawing’ of relations. 346

In this sacrifice of definition, Anderson gains freedom and ambiguity which allows her to be many things in many places while as contact always remaining minimally the same. It is in this sense that she ‘deconstructs’ the border between identity and difference, that she appears as something at once determinate and interdeterminate. 347

One accedes to become “Pac Man,” for example, and in large part Anderson’s United States is a long meditation about how such reductions are performed or imitated. 348

Anderson’s work becomes strangely allied with mass culture. She herself accedes to an authoritarian system of cultural production by disseminating her work through Warner Brothers and Harper and Row…In doing so Anderson ‘performs’ the hegemony’s illusory unifications and subtly reveals its dissonances and discrepancies, but without necessarily enacting a critical stance of her own, a stance which would be recovered merely as another ideological or theoretical formation intended to dominate a field of relationships. 348

Anderson’s work is not part of a historical forgetting, but is an attempt to describe accurately through pastiche how the articulation of vernacular and elite cultures manages to suture the historical subject. 353