Sounding Rhetoric

Retroactively Approaching the 2008 Financial Crisis

2012-02-04T15:59:00.000-08:00

The relationship between conservatism and populism is a curious thing. After all, conservatism, such as it was, didn't have a real positive nameable relationship to populism in America until the late 1950's. Before that, conservatism and populism were either tied together with sham political parties who espoused a horridly reductionist status quoism (think of the Whigs, whom Richard Weaver excoriates in The Ethics of Rhetoric) or with a somewhat stable and fairly straightforward class relationship (progressivism emerged as a version of populism which made no bones about positioning the haves of the late 19th and early 20th century actively against the have-nots, and also made clear the state had an affirmative role in regulating those industries).

Barry Goldwater and committed conservative grassroots movement changed all that. By combining a political focus on limited government with literature (like that of the John Birch Society) which positioned Communism as an omnicompetent (and existential) threat to the American way of life, the "American people" could finally be articulated to conservatism in a meaningful and sustainable way. The anger and frustration attached to a 1960's that was full of considerable less economic vigor than the decade that proceeded it came to be felt by a "Silent Majority" primed for small government by Goldwater's unsuccessful 1964 presidential campaign but ushered into being through effective plays on affect which relied on articulating linkages between the annihilation threatened by the Soviet menace and the socio-political annihilation of a certain kind of middle class hegemony authored by the agitations of social movements.

One resurgence of conservatism populism in the post Cold War era (taking for granted, as I do, that Reagan's conservative "populism" is not ontologically nameable as such, premised as it was upon summoning a disembodied public rather than an explicitly constituted angered vox populi) can be seen today in what remains of the Tea Party discourse that has been coopted by conservatism. This post wants to make one simple argument: those discourses have their roots in the controversy over the bailouts under the TARP program in late September, 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Bros. and the general Wall Street angsts.

After Lehman collapsed and it became clear that economic contagion could not be contained, public discourse ran rampant. One of the most common and immediately emergent memes was that of "Wall Street vs. Main Street" which immediately became not just a theme of both presidential campaigns, but also a regular feature of newspapers covering the collapse, who often, following the "Person on the Street" style of interviews and reporting, asked repeatedly what the harsh times on "Wall Street" might mean for "Main Street," presumably an Anytown, U.S.A. where everyone had worked hard and soundly (they thought) invested their hard earned cash in order to achieve the American dream.

The move to WSVMS (as I will call it) I take to be about the reclamation of agency. After all, one thing the popular and media discourses during the crisis agree is that there was a general sense of fear and anxiety tied to the opacity of the economic situation: not even those on Wall Street knew what was happening, but the rapid report of economic crisis was making it clear that the economic interconnectedness which was thought to raise all boats might in fact hoist "Main Street" on its own petard of dreams. With "ordinary America" lacking economic agency in public discourse, reduced to little more than an epiphenomena of broader market trends in a rapidly moving global market, the language of populism becomes an appealing way to reclaim a sense of self: after all, the investment in "the people" treats them, ideally, as an all-knowing and ominscient form of the self, magnified intensely and projected as a powerful political force with good judgment (we may leave our critiques of "the people" as demagogues at the door here: of course, they are, but for the purposes of that projecting act of future imagining, they conceive of themselves as powerful and right, even more so in the context of an American where socio-cultural discourses coach us that individualism is the sine qua non of rightness).

While Obama rode to victory in part on his credibility as an economic reformer, the kind of anti-Wall Street sentiment that he fostered had an element of humility in it: he regularly in campaign speeches and stump stops, like one in Ohio in mid-October, acknowledged that part of the crisis was the ordinary Americans had been spending too much. Contrast this with the emergence of the Tea Party, whose discourse understood metaphorically "real Americans" to correspond with "successful Americans:" rather than positioning ordinary American as fallible folks capable of making a financial mistake (one that turns the financial crisis into a kind of representative anecdote for the necessity of humility in arranging orientations towards the world) the conservative populism of the Tea Party took financial failings as an index of one's meaning as a person: if you were suffering you were, in Rick Santelli's words, a "loser" who didn't deserve to get bailed out. What the effervescent rhetoric of the Tea Party did was to transmogrify a frustration with Wall Street (and also a frustration with a lack of agency) into anger at those whose irresponsibility was harming the American economy.

These are some brief thoughts: more refined ones soon.

The Politics of the "Bain Capital" Slurs

2012-01-30T20:53:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, the media world was atwitter with the news that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry (now dearly departed) had decided to break an unwritten rule of conservative politics and launch attacks on Mitt Romney for his role as a cutthroat efficiency maven while at Bain Capital, a consulting firm. Gingrich's attacks prompted a serious outcry from pundits, who either concerned that Romney wasn't well suited to rebutting the arguments or thought Gingrich had a legitimate point that might resonate with an electorate who placed the economy at the top of their list of concerns.

The issue was what most called Romney's record of "creative destruction" (Romney's preferred term as well) while working at Bain. Romney successfully eliminated inefficiencies, turned failing companies into successful ones, and also let (made?) companies that were clunkers fail. Romney had previously played on his private sector success as an asset in an election that might come down the economy: this is particularly true when you consider that Romney, as a conservative governor in a very blue state, had to make a number of concessions on liberal issues (health care, gay rights) that wouldn't play particularly well to a base still in the mood for a candidate who could not just mildly differentiate themself from Barack Obama but define themself in an entirely oppositional way. This means that Romney's record in the private sector is absolutely a key linchpin for his campaign: in order to compare himself to Obama, long a man of the public sector, Romney needs to be able to wield a mantle of expertise on all matters economic, based mostly on him "having really done it" while Obama stood on the political sidelines and mettled.

I doubt sincerely whether the facts of Romney's tenure at Bain will much matter for messaging purposes in either the Republican primary (which, btw, Romney will probably still win handily. For the love of God, Newt freaking Gingrich?) or the general election. And I mean that in the following sense: even if the "fact" is that Romney made companies leaner and freed up inefficiencies to both redistribute workers and create more profits (that then flow back into the economy) Romney's narrative will have to first have an awkward encounter with the obverse side of the American dream: that for all the winners in America, there are losers, too, and those losers might either not want to confront their status as such, or might be losers only by virtue of some factor beyond their control (rather than say, their lack of fitness or capacity for certain sorts of work).

To really understand why this matters, we need to go back to the Spring of 2008, when the economy was facing a difficult time, and Phil Gramm said openly that America, during tough economic times, had become "a nation of whiners." Immediately afterward Gramm, who had been a campaign surrogate and adviser for John McCain, took a less visible role in McCain's campaign after withering criticism from pundits, journalists, and ordinary Americans who understood their own dwindling economic prospects as something real, and not just part of a "mental recession." Of course, Gramm wasn't that wrong about the "mental recession" claim: conservatives and liberals alike tend to agree that attitudes (read: consumer confidence) impact the REAL measure of an economy's strength i.e. optimism, willingness to invest given the promise of profit, etc. This didn't matter: by calling those who were struggling "whiners" Gramm tapped into a fear that the typical discourses of liberal individualism in America are effective at displacing: the fear that one might just not be good enough.

After all, Americans are coached that they are special, unique, and exceptional folks, gifted with talents and powers that will help them get to a place of real material and spiritual success. We can find evidence of this either in advertisements (which often hold that the simple capacity to choose the right product makes us special), political discourses (show me a politician who has publicly disavowed the American Dream, and I will show you a non-entity. Moreover, this dream is accomplished by hard work and the application of ingenuity, rather than positioned as an effect of a combination of talent and luck), and plucky cultural narratives about overcoming adversity (Ragged Dick, or choose your superhero). Financial and personal success is an index of one's talent and agency. This accords with how exceptionalist narratives work: if we achieve our City on a Hill through a combination of hard work and good luck, there is nothing to distinguish us from others who work hard other than some kind of beneficial cosmic fortune. On the other hand, if we own that City on a Hill because we mixed our labor with it, it is ours.

This is different from the account of virtue Aristotle gives in the Politics, where talent and hard work are not enough. Chance is preserved as an element contributing to greatness: with talent and hard work but bad luck, one is simply not great. Now this initially seems harsh, but on a second blush it provides a rather appealing account for how to judge success because it installs a kind of ontological humility upon those who succeed: they are never as great as their successes, but they are also (presuming they work hard) never as bad as their failures.

What does it mean, then, for politics to take place on a plane where chance has been eviscerated in favor of an omnicompetent liberal subject who is all knowing, all seeing, and all succeeding? Firstly, it means that those who have not succeeded will struggle to be understood as victims of chance or bad fortune: instead, their status as less materially successful will be read as an index of their competence and effectiveness as a human. (Think of the health care patient facing death lustily booed during an early GOP primary debate: this only makes sense if they are facing a fate they earned). Second, this acts to determine in advance how individuals are understood in a way that tautologically secures one's position in the social hierarchy: not being well off indicates you lack that special something. Instead of the possibility that you have encountered challenges and failed to defeat them, challenges are denaturalized, and thought to collapse easily upon the power of AMERICAN INDIVIDUAL HARDWORKING MCAWESOMEPERSON.

When Phil Gramm complains that America has become a nation of whiners, it is exactly the last thing that anyone who is poor off wants to hear. After all, they've been coached and told and encouraged to think that they are special, talented, and that if they just worked hard things would work out. And yet sometimes, they don't. Without chance, we get a nation of whiners instead of nation of folks facing some hard luck. Without chance, we understand a health care bill that rewards people who have bad market acumen. Without chance, we understand a social safety net to be a form of social Darwinism rather than insurance against fortune's worst.

But without chance, Romney's acumen at diagnosing businesses' flaws and inefficiencies enables him to straightforwardly personify the reasoned decisions that displace many within the economy. Quick reminder: subjectivity works through processes of negative definition and scapegoating, rarely trending towards the positive and/or processes of mortification which humble the subject. Folks without jobs are unlikely to understand their bad situation as something which they have entirely earned themselves. One person's "inefficiencies" are another persons livelihood. If Romney's professional legacy becomes understood as personifying and embodying what the conservative principles of "increased efficiency" mean then in an election where the economy matters, his professional success will become a millstone around his neck. "Efficiency" and other such buzzwords work effectively as abstract concepts, but have a more difficult road to hoe when people can place them in a context that ensures a personal identification against them. Put it this way: you can repeat over and over that a rising tide helps all boats, but when some boats aren't doing so well, they might not give a damn about the narrative.

Political Theory, Representation, and Economic Crisis

2011-12-09T11:33:00.000-08:00

Both political theory and economic theory must account for the question of representation: how to make a government or a market into an effectively functioning quilting point for a political imaginary without becoming so powerful that the emptiness of such institutions of peoples threatens a legitimation crisis. At least one way that Rousseau managed the crisis of representation was, as Honig notes in Democracy and the Foreigner, was through the introduction of a "Foreign Founder" who could sidestep the democratic crisis threatened by having a politics defined purely by a people. If there is is nothing external to the people, then there is no such thing as politics (Schmitt, Arendt, what have you). The figure of the foreign founder created a not-entirely-natural yet not-entirely-mythical figure that could permit decisionism, and in so doing would interrupt what would otherwise be a troubling negative feedback loop of popular sovereignty. The American founders could not resort to myths of foreign founders, since they were in fact foreigners in their own space. Instead, they articulated republican institutions as the mechanism to interrupt this feedback loop: the roots of decisionism came to be known in the split between government and people that inaugurated the people at the same moment that it sabotaged their totality, or full democratic being.

Similarly, Adam Smith-style capitalism was capable of sidestepping crises in representation that might otherwise boggle or make a mockery of market prediction. Because their remained certain services and functions for which the market was thought incapable, the danger that economics might become incapable of recognizing itself was minimal: the state served as a regulatory bulwark capable of repeatedly reminding the market (and marketized subjects) of its limits. The aggressive increase in class consciousness, characteristic of American identity through the founding period and heightened first during the Civil War and then again during the Progressive-era political responses to the heightened perils of the Industrial Revolution, further served to stabilize not only a "political" people (because the state could be captured for use on either side of political struggle for and against various peoples) meant that the market was effectively politicized by calls to government action on social, political, and economic issues.

The sixties signified a very serious sea-change in how American political identity thought about the relationship between government and people: those who boosted and organized for Barry Goldwater beginning at the end of the 1950's operated under the assumption that an ideological war between government and market had been waged and that government had won: the overweening presumption, even for Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, was that as long as the government had the capacity to intervene into a market, that market could not be trusted to provide to maximum efficacy the products and promises it had made. The Goldwater organization, as Rick Perlstein among others have pointed out, lost the battle in the 1964 presidential election but one the war by producing a vision of "the American people" constituted not through internal oppositions between peoples but instead by producing the liberal individual as the natural (one might even say ontological) contrapuntal opposite of the state. The result was that governmental interventions into the market could now be taken in one of two ways: they could either be read as governmental intervention to fix problems where the "market" had failed, or they could be understood as distortions of what would otherwise be a perfectly natural economic outcome. Because "the people" now took on an ontologically oppositional position versus the government, presumption lied on the side of an interpretation which, because discourses repeated reify and reconstitute in familiar rather than challenging ways identities, governmental intervention tended more often than not to be read unnecessary rather than pointing to inefficiencies in the market in which "the people" by virtue of being the market all would share participation in.

We might quibble with critics of neoliberalism, but if we accept as a starting point their thesis that more rather than less of the system and lifeworld is today given over to internal self-regulation by the invisible hand of the market, we can see that what is at stake in times of economic turmoil is a crisis of representation of the sort political theorists like Rousseau most feared: if the market amalgamates more and more political and social life (and indeed, while there remain material zones of un-capture, one need only to closely read the transcript of a single GOP debate to find a near-consensus as to the IDEAL and therefore "real" extent of ideology in this case) then there is no space for a politics (that is, the ability to define a people) because the market is the beginning and the end of politics as such. A "people" defined tautologically by their status as people (that is to say, a collective identity ratified by nothing less and nothing more than its being a people over and against the existence of a government whose existence in an imaginary sense is democratic but in a real sense is ontologically opposed to that very identity it authorizes) do not really exist, except insofar as they are not coterminus with the government. Economic crises threaten a crisis of representation, in which the true culprit for the crisis is unrepresentable (because if the crisis is the market, and the market=the people, the market cannot be taken as the source of its own failure, as it is not judged in neoliberal discourse through its success or failure but instead by its existence as a market) and the inability to produce (we might say embody) the market speaks to what Michel Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics as the kind of shadow chasing game of individualized market economics: a market always chasing its own non-existence, always making, retroactively, a kind of invisible hand that never quite lives up the sum of its judgments. It is in this vein that we should read discourses that respond to the economic crisis: many of them, it seems, want to embody and make real the villains behind the crisis, whether they be Wall Street fat cats, irresponsible homeowners, sinister loan officers, or a government incapable of reining in its own spending. Because the market remains unrepresentable, however, something in these scapegoatings will awesome seem to miss its mark.

On Frank Luntz and Word Choice

2011-12-01T06:19:00.000-08:00

Interesting new article over at Yahoo News on the GOP's messaging response to Occupy Wall Street. As is customary, media guru Frank Luntz has been brought in to massage the conservative message in order to blunt the impact that OWS is having on the national conversation. Luntz is something of an interesting character, especially to those of us housed in communication studies: rhetoricians tend to have a love/hate relationship with him, and this is particularly true of rhetoricians with a progressive bent. For many, Luntz represents the worst kind of vision of communication: dupe the masses with the right kind of word and frame, and to follow up on Carl Weather's infamous proclamation with a difference, "you've got yourself a stew" of conservative messaging. Luntz's semi-regular appearances on Fox News, especially during campaign season, feature audiences responding to debates in real time with clickers that allow them to voice their happiness or displeasure with the goings on. For all the groans that Luntz is nothing more than a charlatan, however, there is often a sense of envy for his abilities. Whether its his invocations against "climate change" rather than "global warming" or his move to rename the estate tax the "death tax," progressives often wonder where "our Frank Luntz" is in these discussions. (George Lakoff, not an elephant, comes to mind as a potential counterpoint here.) To put it shorter: the response to Luntz is "Hey, I can't believe he's doing that! I wish WE could do that!"

Well now, Luntz is advising the GOP how to handle the Occupy movement. That Luntz is thinking about this messaging is important, and it indexes the extent to which Occupy has actually influenced the national conversation. Luntz indeed declares his terror that Occupy might actually begin to change the national conversation and opinion about capitalism. Some of his proposals:

-Don't say "capitalism"

-Say "takes" not "taxes"

-Replace "middle class" with "hardworking taxpayers"

-Replace "jobs" with "careers"

-Call "government spending" waste

-"Cooperate" but don't "compromise"

-Elicit empathy by identifying with the "obviousness" of inequality

-"Job creators" not "entrepreneurs"

-Don't ask folks to "sacrifice"

-Blame Washington for everything

What's remarkable about these suggestions is that, in comparison with Luntz's previous moves like reframing the estate tax as a death tax, these suggestions are actually somewhat banal. I think they index the extent to which the conservative position's discursive pivots have been eroded by Obama's relatively centric political discourse. To some degree Luntz's moves also reveal something of a poverty in conservative political discourse as well. Lest you think I'm just some sort of Lefty "concern troll" speaking flippantly think about it this way: A MAJOR CONSERVATIVE OPERATIVE JUST TOLD PEOPLE THAT CAPITALISM IS NOT A STRATEGIC WORD IN AMERICA. IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN. QUITE A WHILE AFTER THE COLLAPSE OF THE SOVIET UNION.

That's quite a thing there. See, the brilliance of Luntz's previous moves, like replacing the phrase "global warming" with "climate change" was his ability to move away from or into words and phrases with a sort of polarizing power: "warming" signals heat, "estate tax" doesn't generate the same emotional resonance as "death tax" etc. In this case, however, Luntz is unable to move either away from or towards more polarized terms. I mean, "job creator" instead of "entrepreneur"? Are we just back to bashing the French? And I'm pretty sure "Blame Washington" was already on the conservative messaging menu.

Anyway, the point of this post isn't to clown on Frank Luntz (who is quite smart), but instead to make one point: the rather tepid options available for reframing the national conversation in the wake of Occupy indicate that the movement really has put the idea of inequality back on the table. Obama's jobs speech also helped: he didn't shy away from marking differences either, talking about class in a rather meaningful way. This may be because the economy "seems" different to people than say global warming: its effects are experienced regularly every day. Once you can no longer deny the existence of a problem with a tactic like an epistemic filibuster, you are left to debate the causes. The acknowledgement of inequality forces Luntz and others to double down on the figure that makes so much conservative politics possible: the hardworking, right thinking, and infallible citizen whose good work and effort affirm at every turn the political commitment to limited government. So long as economic problems persist, alternate interpretations of events can be subjected to more scrutiny through choices made by rhetors whether in sloganeering or in political speech.

Candidate Whack-A-Mole

2011-11-28T19:41:00.001-08:00

The current crop of GOP candidates is characterized by one constant: it is a two-person race between Mitt Romney and someone else. The parade of figures thought to be capable of challenging Romney's hegemony (shall we say "Romgemony"?) has been a cavalcade of characters: first Michelle Bachmann, whose commitment to the base for a while allowed her to evade showing her warts: then Rick Perry, who took Bachmann's base but whose campaign has been so disastrous that "Hindenburgesque" would be an understatement: then Herman Cain, who ended up on rocky shoals not because of the incoherence of the 9-9-9 (now just 9-9) plan but instead from a combination of foreign policy blunders and accusations ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault: and now we have Newt Gingrich, the zombie politico of the last great anguish of the angry white male, who is in most ways more accomplished as a politician than any of these other potential Romney enemies, but has considerable personal and professional baggage himself, having overseen the government shutdown in the mid-Nineties which was regarded as a catastrophe for the GOP.

To what do we owe this parade of prospects, each one opposing Romney before being hoisted on their own petard? It has to do with the sincerity of the demands for freedom, liberty, and smaller government emanating from the Tea Party, and the relationship that does demands have with the ideology of conservatism. One does not need to venture too far into the world of political and national identity to know one key precept: people define themselves through an imaginary relationship with other people. In the case of American politics, this mechanism for identification cannot shake free of a central recalcitrance: American political culture and discourse so thoroughly value the idea of the free individual that opposition to individualism manifests itself in any number of ways. Chiefly, support of the managerial liberal state (here I refer broadly to statist basics, like social safety nets, which by reductio the Tea Party and conservative base oppose as anathema) is coded as an intrinsic opposition to the power of the liberal individual, because it operates enthymematically by following that assumption that, freed to act, the liberal individual will do good. The other end of this proposition, which is that for some to rise others must fall, tends to be disavowed with the deployment of particulars that undermine the legitimacy of those participants in the system without challenging the aegis of liberal individualism itself: the failure of some is a result of their intentional choices, but the overall primacy of the "idea" of individual choice is not challenged.

We are only slightly more than a year removed from a midterm election cycle at which the belief in the goodness of this sovereign individual was thoroughly supported at the ballot box. Indeed, while progressives were quick to jump on the failures of figures like Sharon Angle in order to chortle that the Tea Party had undermined itself, such rumblings were of little comfort to those who saw the historically unique shift in the 2010 midterm as, if not a paradigm shift, at least a serious retrenchment in American politics.

Recently, New York Magazine had a little bit of Point/Counterpoint fun with two articles, one by Jonathan Chait and another by Bush-era conservative stalwart David Frum. Chait retroactively rereads Obama's election not as some major paradigm shifting signal in American politics, but instead the business as usual result of practicing a palatable-to-the-mainstream liberalism. Frum agrees by way of a critique of the new-radicalism of the conservative base: the remaining strains of Rockefeller republicanism have been evacuated, he argues, in favor of a new conservative strain which virulently argues for small government at all costs, even at the expense of reason itself. Frum of course is no progressive hero: he made his bones as a neocon under George W. Bush, but he is unique amongst conservatives in his stalwart repudiation of the shift in the conservative base following Obama's election. As he points out, Obama passed a health care bill modelled after a conservative proposal from the 90's: and the response is "down with socialism!"

What seems to be at stake for Chait and Frum is the idea of principle: for Chait the Democrats need to get over worrying about having a pure ethics, and for Frum the GOP needs to have some ability to cooperate and moderate because politics is the art of the possible. What does this have to do with Mitt Romney and "Conservative Candidate X?" Chiefly, Romney appears to be a conservative palatable to folks like Frum: a conservative whose own record (reasonable defenses of gay rights, a statewide health care bill) belies his red campaign rhetoric. This is in contradistinction to say, Bachmann, whose rhetoric and legislative record both play very well to the conservative base. I've long suspected that one of the great achievements of the 2008 presidential campaign of Barack Obama was the way in which his candidacy moved simultaneously in ways that allowed it to appear both centrist and leftist: centrist to the great moveable "swing voters" while leftist enough to both appeal to the Move.on crowd and goad conservatives into time honored tactics like Communist scaremongering and feting the wealthy.

The constant dance with the "not-Romney" figures in the race to me indexes a certain kind of crisis within conservatism: a legitimation crisis based on attempting to reconcile the intense pseudo-libertarian demands for limited government with the absolute desire to see Barack Obama (and make no mistake: while Harry Reid and more so Nancy Pelosi find themselves as targets of conservative ire, Obama seems to uniquely ignite this fire). I really doubt that the conservative base will throw electability concerns to the wind, (but I don't own a Magic 8 Ball, and posts like this may betray me) because the negative characteristics of identification I referenced earlier are chiefly important in the construction of political identity. To the extent that Obama successfully stands in for "Big Government" its much less about the particular policies he supports (Healthcare, for example, which tends to poll quite well in pieces is one good example. Another is how polls consistently show the public associates TARP with Obama although it was passed by Bush) and much more about how these particular policies serve as condensation points for opposition to Obama. Romney has his warts, but especially given the economy's continued fragility, conservatives will probably remain focused on the "bad" of Obama rather than inconsistencies in their own political advocacy. There is little real drama in the battle between Romney and the "no-chancers:" we seem to have much more an electoral Kabuki theater of sorts than a meaningful primary. But I do think fundamentally that eventual settling upon Romney indicates conservatives will argue by way of the situation rather than by way of principle: they'll attempt to weigh down Obama with his four years rather than producing a charismatic and complex plan of action for the next four years.

Form vs. Content: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party

2011-10-22T07:06:00.001-07:00

Its fashionable (and interesting) to compare the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. One need not wander too far afield to figure out why: both of them are taking the form (or in the case of the Tea Party when still nascent, took the form) of a sixties style social protest. This form of comparison can, of course, be misleading: as David Zarefsky pointed out in the early 80's in an essay on rhetorical studies's penchant for studying social protest, simply aping the formal characteristics of a social movement (appearing in public, lobbing demands at the state) does not immediately qualify a human gathering as an actual, anti-institutional social movement. However, this point, confined as it was to an article almost 30 years old, seems in some ways to have been lost (if it was ever found) by those comparing the Tea Party and OWS. I too, may prove guilty of this sin. However, I merely plan on assessing how the Tea Party's relevance changes the ways in which OWS can be read by the mainstream media.

To do so requires a reminder about what was truly incredible about the Tea Party: it was a conservative political organization willing to appear in public as an "outsider" organization, that is, as a group claiming to be structurally disempowered politically, and using that status to authorize it demands against the government. Typically, publics theory (especially those who follow closely Michael Warner) understand a key element in discussing political space the identification of those bodies that are marked and visible. Those marked and visible persons, because of their material existence "in" space provide the symbolic resources to construct an unmarked, invisible "mass public" not coterminous with the "marked" public but nevertheless related to them by virtue of the difference they share. But the fact that the Tea Party generated coverage, and was discussed (even in the vein of "are they legitimate?) was key because it established, at a deeper (one might say ontological) level the "truth" of the Tea Party as a protest movement: by virtue of its identification as "not" the public, its existence was certified.

Of course, the underside of this was the Tea Party, by appearing in public, risked marginalizing itself as (to use in an actually relevant way for once) "always already" not the public: by trudging out the white, mostly male, middle aged bodies of the Tea Partiers, they established that they did not belong to the mass public they identified: the progressive, neo-socialist political movement led by Barack Obama. Nevertheless, whatever work the Tea Party did to unhinge a certain version of conservatism from its disembodied position as the structuring possibility of American politics, the Tea Party itself, by measures of either symbolic circulation or policy/electoral success, established itself as a relevant force in American politics.

It was something about the form of the Tea Party that attracted media attention. After all, American for Prosperity, The Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich: all of them were demanding lower taxes, smaller government. And its not as if these calls hadn't succeeded: between Clinton-era welfare reform and the Bush tax cuts, such policy positions were riding high. But the combination of electoral victory for Barack Obama and the ardent, energized, and angry Tea Party proved an alluring media target: how was conservatism configuring itself in the wake of the electoral chaos of 2008's repudiation of conservatism? Its actual appearance, that it appeared at all, was a really big deal, because it signaled a kind of refiguring of American political space.

Josh Gunn (whose blog should be mandatory reading) points out in a recent TP/OWS comparison post that there was a pretty substantial "lag time" in the way the media responded to OWS, owing to the difference in the movements form. Josh argues that the Tea Party was a mostly virtual movement, while OWS was fairly "spatial" in that the actual Occupancy of a physical space near a site of injustice matters. I don't disagree but I want to add a supplement: I also think that the history of social protest in America (Full disclosure: I recently read Nixonland and can't get away from it), especially the dominant narrative of the sixties as a battle between authority and hippies/protestors, helped to overdetermine how the form of social protest was itself a kind of content: one that harkened back to the old battles between cops and Yippies, trials of the Chicago 7, civil rights marches in the South, and so on. The Tea Party, however, as a conservative insurrection, produced the possibility that social protest could not be coded immediately as "liberal" on the basis of form alone. So while the right continues to circulate the old "bunch of smelly hippies" arguments, they are finding a lot less circulation in mainstream political discourse than did say, the WTO protests (also, to the Occupiers credit, violence from movement members has been very, very low). Occupy Wall Street may well persist because objections to the movement on a purely formal basis may be difficult to sustain. Instead, content based arguments about the movements demands (or lack thereof, to read the papers of the day) signify that the form of the protest might matter a lot less for deliberation purposes, and that space for meaningful disputes on the basis of policies is posible (though perhaps not likely.)

In sum: the gambit of the Tea Party was that they could appear as outsiders, aping the protest strategies of progressivism to capitalize on the way the symbolic environment on American seemed to be marginalizing them after the 2008 election. However, by legitimizing "appearance in public" as a protest strategy in form alone, one of the most effective conservative arrows used to delegitimize liberal protest politics (the linking of social protest as a "form" to a history of the "loud minority" cataclysms of the 60's) was taken out of the argumentative quiver. To the extent that OWS makes successes in the future, it owes these in part to a conservative belief that social protest could be coopted in the name of conservatism.

More Thoughts on the "Mere Attention" Thesis

2011-10-10T17:13:00.000-07:00

As is the custom, I read a great deal of conservative media coverage. This is in no small part because I agree with a lot the sentiments in this piece today by The Nation's Eric Alterman. I am discovering that reading the conservative coverage of the "Occupy Wall Street" movement shines some lights on one of the driving theses in contemporary political study: namely, Michael Warner's observation in Publics and Counterpublics that "A public is constituted by mere attention...The cognitive quality of that attention is less important than the mere fact of active uptake" (p. 87). I follow this, and perhaps tend to agree more often than not. After all, existence is kind of a big deal in a world where political discourses opt to deny the existence of a political "Other" with demands. Take, for example, the constant play of patriotism (this is a tactic of Right and Left, although the Right is better at it) introduced by arguments about the "Americanness" of a particular candidate, party, or political demand. Such arguments circumscribe opposition in such a way that the argument/opponent is thought not to even exist by being outside the space of "America." However, even these arguments are forced to grapple with the possible legitimacy of such claims: in and of itself a minor victory. Conservative strategies of "colorblindness" work by even denying the existence of a "marked" racial subject: their effectiveness is in their actual denial of the possibility of "attention" given to the relevant marks, by denying the existence of a racialized public sphere in the first place.

Its with this in mind that I survey three conservative responses to the OWS movement: Mark Steyn's "American Autum" at NRO, Robert McCain's "DIE YOU COWARDLY COMMIE SCUM!" on his blog and Matt Labash's eyewitness take at The Weekly Standard.

One common thought to all three columnists is a focus on the cleanliness of the protestors. McCain calls them "unwashed," while Labash calls it a "hygenic disaster area," even as Stein implies that the protestors do not know how to bathe. Now I'm not a rally planner or a master of logistics, but if your plan is to occupy a large swath of territory for a long time with a critical mass of people, many of whom are not from the area, it is unclear what options for washing exist: moreover, as these folks are in many cases people who find themselves on the wrong end of the current economic bargain, they probably could not afford hotel rooms. If we are to take these complaints at their face value, we have a standard for social protest: no social protest without regular showers! Of course it seems more likely that this argument circulates because it serves to generate a connection between the image of the unwashed longhairs of the 60's with the contemporary protests: and as those protests also rose up in the face of a Silent Majority, so to do these protestors so revel in their opposition to the establishment that they care not at all about hygiene. Or perhaps: the propriety of public space dictates no unwashed masses protesting! Please, only locally found protestors capable of showering every evening!

This might also support the "attention" thesis. The media can no longer afford to ignore the protests (unlike say, the Malachi Ritchser self-immolation in 2006) in part because the coverage of the Tea Party produced an expectation that protest action was a legitimate form of political behavior. Because the conservative opposition can no longer say "Don't bother with those clowns!" (far too many, it seems, ARE bothering with those clowns) the next step is a denigration of the actors involved: some protests might be ok, but probably only the ones where people are dressed as Colonials rather than as sixties radicals.

McCain points indirectly to this problem in his own commentary, where he complains that while the media went out of their way to find associations between the most "radical" members of the Tea Party crowd, they are not commenting upon statements of global solidarity from organizations like the Workers World Party. Of course, it took almost two weeks for major media coverage to settle upon occupy Wall Street. Counterpose this with the immediate almost universal recirculation of Rick Santelli's "Rant Heard Round the World" that launched the Tea Party: consciousness of that rant a scant two days after it happened (a rant by one person, who just happened to have an institutional megaphone) as opposed to a fairly well attended protest taking a few weeks to make it into major media narratives.

Labash's piece operates by a logic of reduction, focused on attempting to manufacture representative anecdotes for "proper" workers opposed to the protestors. Labash spends some time interviewing someone named "Spooky," and while Labash concedes that the approach has a real organic root, he finds in Spooky (a fellow who is unemployed and unabashedly trying to milk his time at OWS for food and profit) the zeitgeist of the protest: free riding for profit. Pizzas, blankets, they have it all. Labash's focus on the agency of Spooky (and those he represents) occludes the reader from asking the question about how Spooky got where he is today: why is someone so resourceful unemployed? Maybe, Labash notes, he just isn't interested in working: Spooky is homeless by choice and came from Orlando because they are not generous to panhandlers there. Labash's anecdote about Spooky takes up roughly half of his column. This allows Labash to imply his major premise: those who "choose joblessness" like Spooky so they can "come and go as they please" make up the vanguard of the protests.

Labash contrasts Spooky with a black man named David Harvey, who is well dressed, and working as a flyer distributor, who says that we ought to "Complain all you want--but on your way to work." This again, begs the question: what about those who do not have a job? The implicit rebuttal is, of course, that these people should go get jobs. Whether or not one is employed is resulted to a simple matter of individual choice: choose (wisely) to get a job or choose (irresponsibly) to not work and simply float.

Labash also quotes a magazine poll indicating that 37% of the protestors think capitalism is immoral. I must admit, given the way the conservatives describe these protests, I rather expected that number to come in at roughly double. Only slightly more than a third...meaning, what, the 0ther 63% are good red blooded Americans who also happen to have legitimate gripes?

McCain's tactic is to ask, with an even/or style, are the revolutionaries mainstream/relevant or are they wacky Communist psychopaths? McCain posits this as a forced choice, buying off and eliding another possibility: that the protests might turn out to be both radical AND popular! Such would be radical politics: a meeting between radicality and general publicity that reconfigures the political.

Mark Steyn's column advances one central argument: that the youth of American are lazy, and want to enjoy a Western lifestyle without earning it. They only like an open border policy because it brings in cheap immigrant labor to do the jobs they don't want, and they are apolectic over having massive amounts of student loans and no career prospects. The question begged is: if Americans have a trillion dollars in student loans, how is it that every individual's judgment is so woeful that they all got a student loan? And in fact if it is woeful than what good comes from reducing individual's agency in making choices (they can't be trusted to make educational decisions, obviously)? Once again being bad off is understood as a choice, with luck, misfortune, and the actions of other individuals and institutions eradicated.

All the responses manifest an anxiety about what Occupy Wall Street means. I mean that in the following way: the discursive performance of all three works acts to A) reduce the protestors to exceptional rather than representative actors, B) locate their status as unemployed/economically disadvantaged as a result of "bad judgment" or an inability to make the right choice, and C) to imply that a concern about economic status is revolutionary rather than sincere and legitimate. The "mere attention" received by Occupy Wall Street, combined with the newfound legitimacy of political protest as a form (in the wake of the Tea Party's rise) necessitates these discursive maneuvers, because the sensus communis can not be trusted to ignore the protests so long as they are receiving attention. Part of the anxiety of communication is the anxiety of interpretation and its multiples: this condition is accentuated under the conditions of liberalism, where individual judgment's sovereignty is encoded in a powerful web of social discourses. We might double down on this proposition in a democracy: the terror that a set of individual judgment's might reign sovereign, and thus reconfigure political space itself, is somewhat terrifying indeed.

"They Don't Have a Demand"

2011-10-08T10:27:00.000-07:00

So I guess there's some obligatory waxing about "Occupy Wall Street" to be done. In general, I'm quite interested in how people attenuate themselves to the movement. There tend to be four or so different responses:

1. "These damn dirty hippies are seditiously ruining our country: just like their forbearers in the Sixties, we should make sure that they know that the vocal and smelly minority won't have a say in politics." This response tends to be conservative. I should also note that to the extent that violence and disobedience are overcoded as the responsibility of the crowd in the cortex of our imaginary, I am sympathetic to quasi-fascist arguments that the protestors should be held to a higher standard of behavior from within, simply to defend their optics. The counter argument, of course, is that even if nothing approaching "inappropriate" behavior is done the media frame will inevitably construct some such action out of misleading bits into a spectacle. Perhaps. This is no reason not to try.

2. "I have sympathies, but what is their PLAN??!" I find this argument the most difficult to stomach, in part because it is the argument where the moderate-pseudo progressive left meets a conservative complaint. Actually, thats the whole reason. Look, in the last 2 years we have seen a resounding wave of conservative populism, a political movement that appears as a function of grassroots beliefs mixed with a healthy does of rhetoric about the "American people" in a way that makes most progressive gaze lustfully at the American flag. Of course, when one pushes hard on the Tea Party for real plans, one comes up against a barrier: those that refuse to defend substantial cuts in Medicare and Social Security, when you get down to policy particulars, do not have a real PLAN to address the liberty-based concerns for which they advocate. This, as Obama has recently been fond of saying albeit a bit less appropriately, is math. However, the reason the Tea Party's arguments have sustained and now embedded themselves as relevant fragments within the deliberative framework of the GOP is because they work within an effective taken for granted frame: that government is bad, and its forces tend towards inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Conversely, the progressive/liberal democratic party has tended to concede space to this argument, generally arguing only for government when its a necessity but generally speaking about the need to free the "American people" to make the country great again. Now there are exceptions: you have your millionaire surtax, your Wall Street/Main Street binary, but the recent decision to NOT push harder EPA regulations underscores the Democratic mainstream's tendency to collapse in the middle MUCH faster than their conservative counterparts. I would like to assert (as many smarter and more eloquent theorists and writers have already) that this is because (until OWS) progressives were conceding the basic thesis of conservative arguments: that government is bad. There are exceptions to this, but it seems like "States of Exception" are more easily generated in the face of an existential threat to all Americans (terrorism, ahem) than in the face of a partial or part-ordered amount of discomfort for many Americans (but crucially, not the universal image of hardworking "Americans" whose suffering must never be read inductively as an indict of America itself.) The reason why "what's the plan" is so frustrating as a response to OWS is that before you have a plan, you have to understand the political terrain. The status quo understanding of the political terrain treats the market and the actors of market capitalism as unvarnished natural goods. OWS is beginning the work of challenging this presumption. So a plan? That might come. For now, you've got to not rewrite common sense, but just make it thinkable that its no longer common sense.

3. "They've been at this a while." They've been there for a few weeks, whereas the unabashed declarations of love from Hayek and Mises are decades old. Lets holster the speed gun, kids.

4. You have cautious support on editorial pages of major daily newspapers. That it is even being covered is a big deal, although I have healthy skepticism's about Michael Warner's "mere attention" thesis: if something receives "mere attention" as an abject/external point to generate another kind of publicity, thats far different from fawning adulation. I do think that this everyday support is a powerful point to argue that the insistence of the crowd that they are just "regular Americans" is a pretty amazing thing. Once the state and not the market became the enemy of the American people, the Clinton-era welfare caves became a fait accompli. If "the people" can become read not as an effect of the government's displacement of their true and thorough virtuosity, but instead as evidence of a linkage between government and popular interest against the market (monsterized in this case at the heart of finance) then that might really do something.

Slightly Tempering a Love for Hannah

2011-05-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

There is an Arendtian moment of sorts a-flutter. Hannah Arendt's work is extremely popular in political science, political theory, and rhetoric, to name just a few disciplines. The appeal of Arendt's work is obvious: she produces, as Bonnie Honig has noted, a theory of the political that claims to be able to produce a kind of political space that is made without the failures and violences that have attached to previously constructed political space (the concept of natality). This, combined with what some have called her notion of the "portable polis," the idea that people through acting and speaking together can constitute the political, have made her work, especially the The Human Condition, particularly salient. Her essay on "statelessness" in The Origins of Totalitarianism provides an insightful and key summary of the problem of compatibility between liberal regimes of rights and the nation state, work incredibly important for the work of thinkers like Giorgio Agamben. And On Revolution remains a key text for political thinkers interested in translation and comparative work between American and European politics.

So this blog post will signal something of a break, both with these wider trends, and with my own internal love for Arendt's work. I want to make one brief argument, utilizing mostly The Human Condition and On Revolution. My thesis is that Hannah Arendt at times cedes the space of the political to the market, and her work, while a stunning and soaring rebuke to the state-sanctioned totalitarianism of the 20th century, nevertheless should be approached with some caution as the locus of the kinds of power that generates violence today may be located more and more outside the strictly understood boundaries of sovereign state power.

I will make two warrants to sustain the claim. The first is taken from The Human Condition, where Arendt avers that politics occurs whenever speaking beings share space. The production of the political testifies to difference, and difference itself is the irrevocable mark of the fact of humanity's political existence, that there is something more, beyond the oikos of the Greeks. Arendt breaks from the darker side of the Frankfurt school (a H/T to Joan Faber McAlister on this point) by turning to her idea of natality as the key concept for how politics builds in the possibility of hope: what comes of politics is never reducible to the politics that has come before, so long as differentiated humans participate in the construction of the shared space. However, the driving force behind this is the desire for immortality, a hope that the works that one does might not be lost to history. There is then, somewhere, a tempered appreciation for the good of competition that lurks in Arend't work. This in and of itself does not invalidate her approach; one my invalidate capitalist arrangements and still believe that competition is good. But such a claim would require that competition results in the production of a better shared space, not one that is less diverse.

Second warrant: Arendt's account of the history of democracy, "the people," and republicanism in On Revolution (brilliant explicated by Andreas Kalyvas in a book called Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary that I greatly recommend) is a stunning account of how the system of American government produces the tools for citizens to understand themselves ironically with respect to the formulation of collective identity. Such humility would seem an utter necessity in the light of the state sponsored fascism of Nazi's, Stalinist's and others (Arendt herself a Jewish German). So Arend't love letter to the American founders comes as no surprise: the American system of government breaks up "the people," eradicating their momentum to become calcified in unreflexive cycles of self-congratulation that turn national identity from a contingent functionary into an essential or natural piece of identity that can then authorize violence. Such a function, however, strikes me as potentially problematic if we find ourselves contesting neoliberalism, which I understand to be a variant of capitalism wherein functions of the state once thought to be essential to its calling are now outsourced to private enterprise, and the space of politics (and the construction of a commons, in terms of humanity, the environment, etc.) is restricted more and more to politics in the sense of a negative liberty, one that authorizes the free exercise of reason by Lockean subjects and little else.

In this case, the tendency of government (and of republican institutions) to break up "the people" is more troubling: the typical response to neoliberal discourses and procedures is to erect a commons that testifies to the necessity of government intervention, and helps to make the case that some goods cannot be trusted to the private. However, in the Arendtian model, there are not only incentives to challenge the construction of a commons ("politics is everywhere"), but also few if any "common goods" can long be sustained as publicly held because the political context of America breaks up people's own relationships to collective identity. The welfare state, it seems, might founder on the inability for the articulation of a shared sustainable future.

A few possible rebuttals: one might note, with queer theorist Lee Edelman, that a common future is regularly constructed, and it just happens to be done more effectively by a right-situated set of political actors. One might easily rebut that the success of such discourses is found in part in their ability to segregate and disavow the republican tradition in America: by insisting repeatedly on the "wholeness" and "futurity" of the American family, space for an ironic or tempered relationship to the fantasies they advance is eradicated.

One might also object that Arendt herself in the mid-century declared that the great "Spirit of Revolution" that the Founders possessed had been lost, and that The Human Condition's final great missives against the mass society of consumerism and so forth indicate that Arendt herself was well aware that the problem of mass society was rooted in the production of utilitarian ends/means mechanisms of thought intimately familiar to capitalist logics. As far as it goes I think this is correct. But this does not respond to the charge: if The Human Condition understands utility calculations the proceed unthought as a problem, this only demonstrates that the potential for a reflexivity about what "needs" are under late capitalism is more urgent, and that the need for a shared commons is greater than ever.

There are a number of problems with engaging in rank populism: xenophobia, declines in the quality of social service, and other attendant dangers present themselves. Nevertheless, a common language of needs is a necessary language in a world where neoliberalism is on the march. And Arendt's brilliant success in providing normative support for projects that fragment and break up "the people," preventing their aggregation, are something of an obstacle. So take note, scholars: Arendt's responses to the problems of state-based violence may suffer a bit in translation where the market is an increasingly important source of violence today.

James O'Keefe and the Gendered Politics of Radical Publicity

2011-04-20T15:30:00.000-07:00

He's like Saul Alinsky's worse nightmare in argyle. His ubiquitous presence offers that what counts as a "radical" politics might not always be associated with radical methodologies for social protest. His own form of conservatively bent but guerilla inspired political intervention certainly operates in with a pitch perfect ear for our current media environs, even if his escapades occasionally end up trading in subtle sexism if not outright misogynistic. If the fevered images of a frat boy gone political went mainstream, they would certainly bear a slinking resemblance to O'Keefe.

Two things interest me about this: 1) the link between O'Keefe's status as a young male and the recent dust-ups with respect to the sexist characteristics of fraternity hazing at Yale, and 2) O'Keefe's embrace of what Saul Alinsky calls the "Rules for Radicals," a play book of none other than the famed Chicago political scene thought to have birthed Bill Ayers, Barack Obama, and any number of other activist stalking horses for the political right. These two points are connected.

First, the gender issue. O'Keefe is a young, good looking man. He looks like your neighbor's kid, who probably weeded your garden for about 10 bucks a weekend until he got old enough to steal away in a moderate suburban sedan to try and sell his plans for world domination to his peers. He is straightforward about the nature of his political pranks. He espouses a philosophy that makes it clear that he believes liberal hegemony of the social is a fact. Keefe is marked as straight (at least, straight to the extent that he wants to protect the nuclear family from ACORN and he wants to seduce CNN reporters aboard the U.S.S. dildo), and I imagine the only thing that distinguishes him in the minds of many liberals from an investment banker are his level of notoriety and pay.

O'Keefe's "sex boat" scheme was deplorable and highly objectionable to say the least. Yet his other successful pranks continue to receive coverage, with nary a mention of how his pranky past is clouded by as much bad judgment as good. I think what we see here, as in the case of knee jerk reactions against feminist interventions against misogynistic chants by frat boys at Yale, is a clear case of how young masculinity receives certain freedoms and permits to "play", a kind of freedom that is not guaranteed for any number of other subject positions. If you "don't get" that O'Keefe's moves were pranks, you "just don't know how to have fun," and take everything too seriously. This language articulates very neatly to the standard set of conservative arguments against political correctness, which claim that the PC movement drains any fun out of social spaces, removing the charge and risk that comes with humor and sex in public and professional spaces.

I see O'Keefe, and I mostly am depressed that liberals keep falling for the hoaxes. But my depression runs deeper. Because I remember how many young men like O'Keefe loved movies like Fight Club, especially because those movies gave young white men a sense of being victimized (in the film by corporate capitalism, but in experience, it seems, that sense of anger and displacement may be easily transfered to other causes). I remember, how as a kid in college and a young masters student, how I sometimes chuckled at the various tales of internet celebrity Tucker Max, who was outright celebrated as a hero of sorts by a certain, mostly male, subset of the university population, for his "winning" stories of casually misogynistic behavior. And indeed, I shudder at the strange embrace of Charlie Sheen, a clear perpetuator of domestic violence and probably sex slavery, for having the "courage" to produce a public persona that says NO to discourses of therapy. And lest you believe that I mistake the popularity of his insanity for actual support it is worth mentioning in our digital environs that in this economy of celebrity circulation, a retweet is akin to giving the figure a certain kind of currency.

Second point: O'Keefe embraces a radical leftist/guerilla sensibility when it comes to his pranks. He and his film crew insinuate themselves as real people, seeking support from ACORN or Planned Parenthood, in order to eviscerate these organizations of their credibility. His mechanisms play upon the social trust that these organizations have to give to those who come to them, the trust of sincerity. But I confess: when each prank is revealed, my blame and concern is not generally for O'Keefe, it is rather directed at those who fall for the tricks of the camera crews. Because what O'Keefe's performances reveal, clearly, is that nobody is perfect. For every ten legitimate pap smears or dozen pieces of sound advice given to a confused young sexually active woman, there are undoubtedly instances in which the actors located within Planned Parenthood fail to act responsibly and in civically defensible ways. Of course this goes both ways: not every troop in Iraq went "Abu Ghraib" on interned Arabs. The point is that it takes a long time to build up social capital and trust, but it takes very little to erode these, whether this is trust for public, semi-public, or private institutions. Just as community organizers who were inspired by Alinsky's tactics would sneak rotting fish into safety deposit boxes at the end of the close of the business day to protest bank takeovers, so to do O'Keefe's take advantage of the open ethos of organizations that provide a public service.

The key in this case, however, links my first and second points. O'Keefe has not only appropriated radical methods and put them into action, but he has done them in a social and political climate where the straight white male is thinkable as a victimized subject (the recent controversy at the University of Iowa over Conservative Coming Out Day is just another example). Ultimately, the more questionable tactics that O'Keefe takes can be excused, because critics "take all the fun out of everything." The political successes he scores, however, count as palpable hits because they reveal the possibilities of institutional failure that underwrite criticisms of big government. They are visible. A video of a woman receiving a pap smear would not be newsworthy, nor is it even possible to succintly put together into a 10 second video clip a sound bite that explains how because Suzie wore a condom, she got her BA in four years. But these stories are the other side of O'Keefe's interventions. In this case, however, the clean cut, educated, straight white male has again ventured over to the "dark side" to reveal that the dark underbelly of liberalism is, to take another pundit's words, "what we thought it was." His full on embrace of radical and misleading political methods (somewhat creepy and carrying odd violent implications in the case of the "bondage dungeon" stunts) reads as so much white noise to the conservative base because the hypocrisy that he reveals hits home. O'Keefe is a crusader for a victimized American-ness, and his embrace of radical political tactics well suited for the 60's only hammer home that indeed, the American tradition is one in crisis, one that calls for a temporary suspension of the conservative criticism of "radical" methods in order to expose the real truths of the political left.

All this being said: Planned Parenthood needs to report sex slavery. That is true. It is also true that what O'Keefe does reproduces a certain set of normative beliefs about America that contribute to a potentially problematic political environment, by eliminating through quickly promulgated video-ready enthymeme much good work done by institutions for people in need.

Death Drive of the Republic

2011-03-08T17:36:00.000-08:00

In the imaginary, democracy poses the possibility of a return to the original (apolitical) condition of human existence: a world without signification, a world without politics, a world where the natural unity of the people guarantees political harmony. For example, people do not identify with democracy out of some hope that it will temper or humble their own identity/perspective: the allure of the democratic is that it offers the possibility of the projection of the self into a kind of universal, the ultimate form of self-affirmation. This is what explains the allure of democracy rhetorically, at least for both E. Burke and Arendt in On Revolution.

The messy world of the symbolic, the compromise formation that testifies to the utopic position of the imaginary, emerges as the other side of the logic of self-projection that drives the rhetorical appeal of democracy: the pluralistic and difference riven conception of "the people" that functions as a universal to gain adherence also stands in for "persons". Nothing new here: this is a fancy way of describing the Platonic charge of demophobia, although we might say in addition to the Platonic worry that "the people" might run roughshod over truth, there is an additional issue built in at the simplest level of identification: the existence of the other "selves" which goad one initially to attempt to project the self as a universal that founds the political, not only frustrates that full realization of identity is simultaneously threatens the self with the secret truth that the self is never so whole as it seems (again, basic Lacan).

Now so long as what frustrates the full achievement of a pure people as sovereign is a split within "the people", you get your purges and your scapegoating and your democratic what-have-you, following Arendt, K. Burke, Stavrakakis, etc. Each attempt, once more, to purify the people struggles to identify the conditions of its own failure in anything other than a kind of bizarre inductive: we elevated "the people" to the position of power, problems persist, we must have picked the wrong "people". In this case it seems clear that we can dredge up the old familiar Copjec discussion: "the people" are being taken in for their failure to live up to their ideal image.

Alternately, we'd like it if "the people" could be appreciated as they are, what they are, in and of themselves. So it becomes a question of how we produce a kind of political "sense" or "atmosphere" or "mood" or "affect" that positions democratic subjects with a kind of skepticism not towards "actually existing" democracy but instead to its authorizing imaginary force. This is extremely difficult: as said earlier, few if any modes of identification operate by behaving skeptically and cynically towards the self, authorized as they are typically by a differential equation premised on exceptionalism.

So it seems like the genius of republican representation (and the further checks and balances in the American system of separation of powers) is that it provides a possible mechanism to produce skepticism towards any set of government actions as not being properly representative of the people: this makes a good deal of sense if your concern is with too much government power (like a bunch of Lockeans skeptical of the Hobbesian Leviathan sick of paying taxes to the King, or if you're a Jew who just escaped the state-run genocide of your people in Europe, like Hannah Arendt).

However, under the conditions of late capitalism, this virtue becomes a vice. To the extent that a pervasive skepticism of the people is built in to the structural political system, it reduces our capacity to understand popular demands as strongly authorized, demanding instead a kind of suspicion to these claims. So to the extent that the symbolic space of America is less and less tolerant of the welfare state, this reflects not only the neoliberal belief that governmental functions should be outsourced to private agents, but also the general fear that the government's actions are not what the people want. The republican theories behind American political institutionalism are built for an era where state power is the ultimate threat, and does not envision a world where the asymetrical aggregation of private property threatens the well being of the population.

So to the extent that democratic theory envisages a return to the original conditions of existence, those that are pre-political or pre-social, how does it compulsively repeat attempts to return to these origins? It seems like in a weird way the prepolitical character of democracy's offer of a pure people parallels capitalism's offer of a level playing field: both offer the annihilation of difference if you will only take one deshistoricizing pill. If the move towards a full "people" is desire, and if the drives are what break up that move (in this case republican institutions), then constitutive rhetorics demonstrate a kind of repetition compulsion in gesturing to a total and complete people that can never be completed. But instead of allowing us to locate this difference within the people deductively (compare this to the inductively violent result of the French Revolution), republican institutions locate this split not within the people but in the act of translating the popular will into political institutions themselves. Now so long as you have what Arendt calls the "revolutionary spirit", that is, a radical committment to the idea that every beginning can be a completely new beginning, this is perhaps not such a problem: institutions can be made again, and made in ways that their lack of selfsameness with previously existing institutions does not doom them to a failure by comparison. But when the totality of "the people" is regularly interrupted by institutions (and indeed, "the people" are constituted against the government in the style of contemporary conservative suspicion of governmental action), it seems that the repetition compulsion to summon "the people", if it is indeed an urge to return "to an earlier state of things", is nothing more than a reminder that the people are not the government.

Fetishizing Radical Democracy

2011-01-03T15:20:00.000-08:00

We are, it seems, very into radical democracy. Positing that the field of the political is nothing more (and nothing less) than the competitive play of discourse permits scholars to advance compelling and appealing arguments such as the one developed in 1985's seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, where Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that the most important political task is to remember that there is nothing outside the political (or the discursive) and so new hegemonic articulations (important shifts on the rhetorical landscape in which certain signifiers occupy new positions that correspond to new political opportunities) are possible no matter how the dark the times may appear for progressive politics.

In theory, of course, this articulated political is to radical critique what the printing press was to the word of God: a force to democratize the understanding of the social radically, turning the power of liberalism into a kind of bulwark against a pre-determined political by insisting that the political as it is constructed now could always be otherwise. And as Laclau explains more acutely in On Populist Reason, the vehicle capable of articulating new politicals is that of "the people", the ultimate democratic category, one who force of interpellation is powerful.

But what if there is a kind of hostility built in between the democratic ideal and the progressive social welfare state continuously supported by Laclau, Mouffe, and the like? After all, populism works on an imaginary terrain through the assertion that the people know best: that they know their interests, that their judgment is sound, and that internally these facts will be tautologically reaffirmed by the normative goodness of the will of the people.

All well and good. These very smart people are aware of the potential pitfalls: Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox is built around the persistent clash between liberalism and democracy. Liberalism, with its focus on the individual, is at a kind of structural loggerheads with the democratic ideal, whose committment to equality threatens to cancel the liberal committment to freedom. Still, however, both notions valorize the people: liberalism trusts the individual judgment and valuation of various markets, while the democratic ethos insists that an aggregation of the popular voice produces something marching in the direction of "the good life."

Neither account offers much bulwark against the threat that kept the Founders up at night: the tyranny of the majority. Moreover, republican political institutions exist in a way to counter both democracy and liberalism: their very existence signals a distrust of the individual's judgment or the voice of the people. Yet few theorists speak of advancing a "radical republicanism": it is assumed in advance that the interests of the people articulate to normative goods. If progressive political articulations are consistently structured around finding the voice of the people then there is a kind of subtle fetishism produced: we again attempt to find the people's "true interests", or to refigure/rearticulate them through discourse.

But the very idea of a people's interest is no political neutral. In fact, support for what individuals want supports individuality itself. This perhaps strikes us as no particularly troubling until we do a quick and brief survey of the kinds of discourses that pop up in say, the recent flare up of Tea Party movement. Here we see a series of discourses that unconditionally exist upon the sovereign individual. Moreover, these discourses are commited to a kind of radical eradication of productive relationships between government and citizen (cf. Sarah Palin's keynote address to the Nashville Tea Party rally).

If one sought to take up arms against the Tea Party discursively, one option advocated by the radical democracy crowd might be to produce a more effective version of the "popular will", one that would counter the radical individuality of the Tea Party with something like a set of popular demands for the expansion of the welfare state. The problem is that, viewed comparatively, the former arguments have a kind of build in leverage point for success by implicitly valorizing the individual. Discourses that bombard the state with paternalistic demands, but do so on individual/liberal terms, risk reproducing the very political terrain so sympathetic to the radical liberal individuality of the Tea Party. This, perhaps, is why a kind of republican vocabulary is necessary: it does not always trust the people, and so is capable of supporting with a kind of intellectual consistency support for the welfare state.

Form, Content, and the Rhetoric of Social Movements

2011-01-02T13:07:00.000-08:00

In 1980, David Zarefsky warned that the way that rhetoricians studied social movements took for granted the agitations and discourses of a movement at their word. Namely, he said, what guaranteed that a social movement always existed outside the existing relays of power in a given political space besides its own claims to be a "social movement"? Rhetorical studies, he argued, risked deciding in advance what was and was not a social movement by assigning certain movement-specific content a transhistorical role indetermining the formal characteristics of what counted as a social movement.

Zarefsky's alternative was to always insist on historically situated studies of the rhetoric of particular controversies and demands. Through close historical analysis, one could presumably figure out at a given synchronic moment whether or not one was seeing an oppositional or hegemonic social movement. Zarefsky's form/content argument strikes me as absolutely correct: just saying you're a social movement doesn't make it so, and the left does not hold a monopoly on discourses of social agitation.

One is also tempted to fill out Zarefsky's objection through a recourse to post-structural theories of political space and identity. Namely, what is at stake in even announcing the existence of something like a "social movement" implies the existence of something like a total/fixed/settled field of the political and its constitutive discourses at a given moment. The danger, of course, is analagous to the recurrence of the "determination in the last instance" problem faced by those attempting to make critical gestures at the existence of structures without allowing those structures to pre-exist the political possibilities available to critics. That is, once you've established what a social movement is "against", that which it is "against" is thought to pre-exist the social movement and movements always occur in a kind of dialectical relationship on an existing political plane. The movements, however much they oppose what exists/is hegemonic, nevertheless have some of their radical oppositional potential drained by defining themselves oppositionally rather than producing their own independently intelligible discourse of appeal.

To contextualize through criticism: one might think about how, for example, how ineffective on a large scale pro-socialism discourses in America are today. This is not because there is anything inherently unpersuasive about socialism: indeed, America has a long and glorious history of federally and state enacted "socialist" policies. It is, instead, because the American political imaginary coheres through an understanding of socialism that displaces and marks its discourses as alien to discourses of "Americanness" in the abstract. We can think of this as needing a kind of rhetorical means-testing: until a socialist policy is calcified in the realm of the political the presumption lies against its normative desireability. All of this operates under the presumption that something like "Americanness" exists, that it is known, and that it does a kind of natural/guaranteed work in producing a coherent political space.

Back to Zarefsky: how can we even begin to claim to know the contours of political space before we investigate it? I think that we cannot. All we can do is to inquire (following Foucault) after the conditions of discourse's intelligible enunciation. To do otherwise risks stipulating in advance that a certain something already exists as the antecedent to the discourses that exist, and in so-doing we might naturalize the existences of the very hegemonic discourses to which we are opposed. If we map progressive political content onto the form of social movements generically, we are left always doing criticism that produces social movements as outside an already established system. Once they are outside, there is a kind of historicized presumption against them. McGee was, as always, onto something like this before most with his seminal work on social movements. For now, careful of form and content!

Why Can't the People Be Wrong? Or, On Popular Egotism

2010-12-30T14:04:00.000-08:00

Since Plato, the prospect of popular rule summons up a terrifying demophobia. Whether understood as a distrust of the masses as a kind of idiotic hoi polloi, concerns for how a majoritarian tyranny might take advantage of the minority, or the Arendtian worry that mass society with no check brings the risk of fascism, these claims consistently attend critiques of democratic rule.

Contrast the suspicion of the people with the also-constant suspicion of elites that in part explains democracy's appeal. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely!" shout maxims. "Let them eat cake!" signifies the inability of the ruling class to ever connect with the concerns of people. One reason the printing press really mattered was because it offered up the possibility of a popularized, rather than centrally controlled, understanding of religion and God. This historical keystones find substantial sympathy within the academy: Theodor Adorno's radical distrust of expertism, Michel Foucault's critical investigation of expert mantles as discursive assemblages rather than as absolute pieces of armor, and however many Marxist demands against those in power illustrate that a lack of faith in the empowered is common enough.

Contemporarily, however, only one of these discourses circulates popularly enough that we might think of it as hegemonic, or at least strongly influential. That is, I think, the suspicion of elites. Lets attempt an analogy: Clintonian "Third Way" politics have taken their share of criticism because of the compromises made with neoliberalism in the name of political necessity. Welfare reform and free trade, it was said, were the cost of business, of pushing other policies friendly to progressive politics. Surely Clinton-era successes like the Patient's Bill of Rights, increased taxes on fossil fuel companies, and tax cuts for the poor and tax hikes on the rich are understood as political victories from a progressive standpoint. Many have claimed that the rhetorical concessions made to neoliberalism (economic growth as a premiere policy goal, neutral assumptions about opportunity and effort at the individual level, and support for free trade as a lever of change) undermined the important old progressive political coalition, eradicating the rhetorical resources (notions of class, race, gender etc.) necessary for constituting a political coalition capable of decisively influencing public policy.

We might benefit from asking: was there ever a similar phase in American politics where the resources necessary for making the demophobic critique of "the people" were lost, concessions made for some other instrumental political good? Its certainly easy to pinpoint at least one golden age for government management, stretching from the administration of FDR (emboldened by the Great Depression) into the Great Society era of Lyndon Baines Johnson. During this time government did many things for many people: social security, welfare, civil rights, and countless and innumerable expansions of governmental policy. While the exigence of the depression might have authorized a good deal of FDR's policies, the discourses outlived him in presidents who created national highway systems, raised the minimum wage and strengthened social security, and went on the fight the war on poverty in the name of a Great Society.

Like any political movements, these policies made sense within their particular times. FDR's great policies were considered necessary given the extreme threats of economic collapse. Truman and Eisenhower presided over post-war booms but the specter of the depression continued to stalk the American landscape. And JFK and LBJ had nations on fire, with evental political epidemics of discrimination and crime that necessitated large visible social policy.

By the time of the Reagan Revolution, however, social policy was on the defense. The economy was devastated in the late 70's by a combination of foreign oil crunch and the notorious "stagflation" of American currency. Reagan's administration, while it did not succeed in radically shirnking the size of the federal government (it continued to grow at a solid rate) did commit rhetorically to hollowing out the government's committment to social policy and functionally doing so by making massive tax cuts. All this during "Morning in America", a time of new beginnings for an old and hallowed place full of bright and motivated individuals simply yearning to break free and make a new life for themselves.

What could explain this shift? This is a blog post, not a history book, but the other day over a drink my friend Patrick brought up a good point: that during the 50's and 60's, there was a political consensus against communism and its embodiment in the Soviet Union. Certainly this consensus mostly emerged in the shadow of the threat of thermonuclear extermination, but it could directly articulate itself as such (perhaps the psychoanalytic trauma of the horror was too great, necessitating a displacement, but it is also likely that the threat of big government control threatened by Stalin's purges and the related horrors of WW2 legitimized this anxiety, which still needed to find its basis in democratic and relatively genocide-free America in what new social policies COULD prefigure). So whatever domestic policies could be associated with the kind of big government social managerialism characteristic of both America AND the Soviet Union could then be linked, however complexly, to these existential anxieties about the threat to America posed from abroad.

So while a liberal, managerial politics is consistent both with the fact of America (so many policies embody this ideology) and its history (we did, after all, ditch the Articles of Confederation for a reason) it is highly likely that the appeal of such policies diminished as the Cold War began to increasingly overdetermine the idea of what "America" went during a period that saw numerous proxy conflicts and an imaginary colonized by the threat of nuclear extermination. In order to differentiate American from the Soviet menace, its ideological discursive committments (equality, planned economics, state intervention, socialist policy) had to be taken as absolute terrors, co-equal with the threat of Soviet dominance (always articulated as an ideological/absolute clash).

So one thing we might glean from this admittedly brief and too broad reading is at least one insight: the horrors of big government have far more punch and verve than the benefits big government supplies. The discursive economy privileges threats of evental genocide, nuclear annhiliation, and economic collapse much higher than the values provided to individual's everyday lives by a powerful and vibrant welfare state. Not to sound like broken record of some terrible K debate or anything, but we seem to lack a language to describe why exactly goods like equality or health care ought to matter as much as others. The necessary supplement to this reading is to figure out how "the American people" came to always be on the one side rather than the other, which I shall pursue in my next post.

On the Location of The People

2010-11-28T05:44:00.001-08:00

In an address to the Congress on February 24th, 2009, Barack Obama delivered a stemwinding speech that progressives hailed as a phenomenal victory. The New York Times's Frank Rich argued that it was a "riveting" address, but one that also put Obama at a crossroads, confronting the nascent populist rage embodied in Rick Santelli's now famous rant against "bad behavior" on CNBC. Obama's speech was well received by the public; polls after the speech showed a meaningful pro-Obama bounce. Indeed, even conservative David Brooks praised it as "an excellent speech."

What interests me about the speech is just how conservative it is in content while stylistically is more liberal. It discusses the necessity of governmental intervention to the economy as a temporary intervention in an exceptional circumstance, only needed insofar as it brings us back to a condition of such economic stability the free competitionon an equal plane between economic agents can resume. Obama also locates the responsibility for the economic crisis not just on a greedy Wall Street, but also emphasizes that individual Americans have been behaving in economically irresponsible ways.

Obama also flatly defends American exceptionalism. Economic malaise threatens not human life or dignity but rather the danger is that America's status as "the greatest force of progress and prosperity in human history" might be threatened. What will overcome this threat is the American spirit; government action is conditioned upon this fact. Government only acts until once again American excellence can again take over. Rather than examining the economic malaise as a symptom of a deeper problem (pursuing a perspective by incongruity or inquiring after the "metaphor of the metaphor"). The problem is not with the idea of America; it lies with how those called Americans have misbehaved within the structure itself. The economic collapse provides us with a "time of reckoning" in Obama's words, one where it is time to own up to our irresponsibility for borrowing irresponsibly, consuming too greedily, and refusing the future for gains in the near-term.

Obama thus particularizes the human behaviors of the last few decades that led to the economic issues as fundamentally resolvable through human choice. Recession could be avoided: if only we were better capitalists. No foreclosures but if banks don't let greed cloud their market judgment. It seems that the real issue is not a systemic one with the economic system, as Obama's opponents would have it, but instead adjustments within the system. The agents within the system must behave according to the rules of the system.

So fine, dear reader, you might flag this as a banal observation: Hey lookee! The president is supporting the vision of America that everyone assumes is predominant. All well and good. But we ought to be attentive to the situation, as well, and ponder: Obama's speech is responding to a tidal wave of anger (and as it would turn out, populist anger). How does Obama's speech figure the people?

The short answer is: he doesn't. Or at least, they are nothing more than an assumed mass, whose existence is already guaranteed. Their individual agency need only be liberated from our temporary morass. While government is figured as something that does work for the people, that work is only temporary, necessitated by extenuating circumstances. This is true with one major exception: for Obama, the people don't really know that they need his help. He positions the judgment that there is a crisis at the level of the popular but the solutions are positioned as emanating from the government. His tone is to say: "Look at all these things we (I) are (am) doing for you! Tax cuts! A recovery plan! Functioning loan markets!" However temporary, government is the condition of the possibility of a now-functioning American polity.

In this way, the often rambunctious and fiery Tea Party arguments, structured around a sort of populism that locates liberation in common sense and oppression in vague managerialism, gain ground. Because the judgment of the crisis is located in both the people and the government but the content of the solutions is decided by the government, any time-delay in the resolution of the crisis can be attributed to a failure in the government's solution-side judgment rather than in a misdiagnosis of the problem (a diagnosis shared by government and people). The supplement of the government can then be more easily discarded rhetorically, in favor of a sure-sighted support of what the people want--presumably, more freedom and individual liberation.

On the Midterm Election and your Facebook Rhetoric

2010-11-03T11:10:00.000-07:00

Previously, other commentators and this blogger have noted how the roots of the Tea Party are based in a lineage that comes directly from the 20th century's suspicion of communism: particularly, the suspicion of elite managerialism that accompanied the John Birch movement and the Red Scare. Critiques of various communist nations centered around their committment to large government programs that reduced people to numbers in order so that they could be aggregated and liquidated through collectivization. "The Great Leap Forward" or "The Five Year Plan" or any other such sloganeering today strikes us as ironic and grim, in light of how public political discourse memorializes the violence of the great political turns to communism.

Little surprise, then, that the distrust of big government (which has always been a powerful American meme) blew up starting with the bailouts and health care debate ("too big to fail" and "death panels"). This discourse plays easily in the contemporary American landscape because while temporally we are increasingly distanced from the threat of "actually existing" communism (the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe collapsed, Cuba seems a failure, China is Red but also seems to be increasingly liberalized by market forces), spatially we find ourselves still inhabiting a political space defined by its opposition to communism. This history cannot be easily disavowed.

Discourses suspicious of managerialism, then, are more than mere rhetorics; they are constitutive of American political space in the sense that that always conjure an authentic people who knows better than the government by virtue of not being the government. Hence the circulation of the images and stories of the Founders; they are the ultimate embodiment of a people who never trusted that the government "knew best".

For whatever reason (despite a long history of our government doings lots of good things for people) the presumption politically seems to be against governmental action. This presumption seems to operate ideologically as opposed to contingently; the people are greater than the government is a widely accepted American enthymeme (our status as a democratic republic notwithstanding).

So on the day after a midterm election that has shattered Democratic dreams and elected a host of new Republicans office, a healthy reminder: the more your opinions and Facebook posts and complaints assert in advance that people could not possibly support the Tea Party, or about how Barack Obama is so obviously a great president, the more you contribute to the production of the distance between your own political (probably Democratic) position and that of the Republicans, because you're assuming in advance that you're right rather than figuring out the perhaps even honest or sincere political opinions of others. Don't allow your belief in the superiority of your own political opinions to substitute for making a rigorous judgment about political arguments. Because that substitution that comes off as somehow elite or superior; the result is that it activates that very same sort of "elite/people" divide that drove divisions during the Cold War. So just be careful, is all I'm saying.

Joe the Plumber and the Politics of Referents

2010-10-14T16:12:00.000-07:00

Our graduate seminar had a lengthy discussion about agency, and the possibility of taking action in a world where agency is found in chains of iterations rather than human actors.

To wit: the critique of the Butlerian/deconstructive positions holds something like--your view of subjectivity denies the possibility of interventions into the world because while on one hand it eviscerates reference (this evidences all kinds of practical problems) it also elevates these references (names) into a higher order of existence (this would be the nominalist position, that things are their names) by establishing that their naming functions as a kind of overdetermination. Presumably the result would be debilitating for scholars interested in fighting violence and oppression because without being able to refer to categories around which meaningful resistances might be articulated (race, class, gender, national origin, etc.) critical rhetoricians would be locked into pursuing something like a politics of unintelligibility. Or, if recourse to such categories is allowable, it would only be by means of contradiction (i.e. the invocation of these categories is not neutral, they are historically developed, and so how can we ensure that our use is not just another pernicious effect of a chain of iterations?)

A response, following what is here (allowing some Butler and Foucault as well) might hold something like: the recuperative argument is undone by installing initially and taking for granted the demand that words mean something more than "just their name". That is, to yearn for a concept or set of notions under which one might organize some kind of resistance (to say nothing of the rather large debate about whether agency is about making change, and what counts as change in a world where subjects are constantly being remade rather than shuffled around on a chess board) presumes in advance that said concept is meaningful/necessary to produce change. Of course, it is the desire to have some kind of stable footing in a dynamic world that operates as the cause (and I don't mean cause in a strict case/effect model, I mean something more like De Man argues here when he notes that what distinguishes the cause and effect is nothing more than the naturalization of metaphor, a naturalization whose repetition consistently a certain kind of ordering whose rightness can be verified by no external authority) of that very anxiety in the first place--what is displaced is that understanding that the anxiety stems from the absence of a founding point for the reading. Instead, this anxiety of no origins is replaced with an anxiety that stems from the moves away from metaphorized/naturalized understandings whose extensive repetitions secure (to use a bit of debate jargon) the status quo.

If this seems theoretically dense and annoying (guess who's been studying for comps!), an example: if we say that agency is in a chain of iterations, rather than in people, a good democrat might complain that this forecloses the ability of humans to attempt to mobilize causes for justice around the image of "the people", because that understanding will always be purely discursive rather than grounded in some actually existing democratic coalition. My counter would be: the understanding that agency stems from chains of iterations rather than agents themselves is the key condition for mobilizing something like "the people" in a way that is not historically determined. After all, it is the materially grounded understanding of "the people" (the loss of which is anxiety generating for those interested in recuperating a doer behind the deed) that seduces us with its claim to intelligibility, but it is the claim to intelligibility that tautologically prohibits us from questioning necessity of the term itself (because its relevance is naturalized rather than being subjected to critique). For example, the failure of "Joe the Plumber" as a conservative enthymeme in the 2008 campaign was a result of the fact that his deployment assumed a logic of external reference. The McCain campaign assumed that a certain kind of Americanness was available through JTP, and didn't hestitate to push him for a couple weeks. The problem was that the selection of JTP as a campaign avatar was guided by the belief he could function as a synecdoche, but instead he had a life of his own, becoming a kind of allegory for Americanness. He had back taxes, no plumbing license, and whenever he talked his political opinions never seemed quite up to snuff. Confronted with the possibility that JTP showed a kind of absence at the heart of politics, subjects simply began to identify against him--rather that confronting the split between "the people" and politics, he simply represented neither category properly. If politics worked with referents, as my fellow compatriots hold, JTP's failure would have sparked some sort of rethinking. Instead, he was always "in and for himself".

Here we see that the problem is not a slide to "pure nominalism"--the function of langauge to cut us off from external reference, and then its ability to seal us from encountering that fact by having already installed itself as a natural rather than a contingent truth ensures that we are already on a nominalist plane whether we like it or not. Trying to rescue some kind of agency from this fact lies in letting it be an assumption that drives our theorizing--and its meaning as an assumption is evacuated if we alter or forswear it by insisting that things are otherwise, as the call to recuperate agency does.

More Tea Party Madness

2010-09-17T17:59:00.001-07:00

No stranger to the public eye these days, the Tea Party continues to announce its fresh relevance. The latest incident to underscore the importance of the political movement is the victory of Christine O'Donnell, a family values conservative in Delaware who defeated a more moderate conservative in Mike Castle in a senatorial primary. Several liberal bloggers and commentators celebrated the victory as a case of the Tea Party cutting off its nose to spite its face--Delaware will almost certainly not go red in the midterm election as a result.

David Brooks, however, gets it right in his column today when he argues that in the short run, the Tea Party will still help to deliver a crushing blow to the Dems in the midterm. Long term, he thinks, the fallout from the movement may be bad for conservatives as the Tea Party's radical ideology (just a hop, skip, and a jump away from a form of libertarianism) is subjected to more scrutiny (presuming several external conditions like the economy somewhat reverse themselves).

Some of my own armchair theorizing: I think it bears a historical resemblace to 1994, when the GOP had massive gains and Bill Clinton was really down in the polls. In fact, Newt Gingrich has even talked about how the GOP should consider staging another massive fight over the budget in order to force the rollback or repeal of some parts of Obamacare. 1994, like today, saw an electoral cycle dominated by resentment fuelled political appeals. The GOP arguments were similarly about the problems with who was in charge. One major difference, I think, was that there was a more clearly developed platform in 1994--the Contract with America actually offered up some bipartisan policy measures like term limits, and campaigning on welfare reform (which perversely put a "human face" on a fairly noxious policy) was effective.

Today, however, its unclear what new policies the GOP would enact or try to enact. One of my professors likes to argue: don't worry, they'll have something. Even if I agree with this (I would have a little more faith in that argument if a few conservative politicians would really back Paul Ryan's budget roadmap, for example), I suspect that thinking about the coming political circumstance through a fairly simple lens of guilt and identification might paint a rosier long term picture for the Democrats. Let me explain.

To begin with, I think its a fairly uncontroversial presumption to say that in America the people identify much more with the president than the Congress or Supreme Court. How many historically important senators or house members can the average person list? Not nearly as many as presidents I'd wager. My suspicion is that this is a function of the human necessity to reduce complexity: we participate in producing the government, but we want ourselves wholly to produce it, so the way that the Congress fractures national identity is resistant to our desire to identify self with government. Generally speaking, people say the politician who most inspires them is Ronald Reagan or FDR. Rare is the figure who musters a strong defense of John Calhoun or Tip O'Neill.

Barack Obama was elected, and by a very strong margin. This fact cannot be wished away by conservatives (nor regretful liberals). And because the image of "the people" authorizes his term in the presidency, frames of rejection for his term have to negotiate with the fact that they disagree with the will of the people. In a midterm, of course, what helps facilitate this negotiation is what politicos refer to as the "enthusiasm gap" that almost always accompanies the middle of a president's first term. Right now the symbolic contours of the national political debate are being overdetermined by the poll numbers (leaning very conservative) and the visibility of the Tea Party and other conservative movements.

But a big win in the midterm cannot undo the rhetorical work done by Obama's victory in 2008--because at that moment, a lot of Americans put their stamp of approval on his brand. The result will be that a big midterm win can be understood as a conservative victory--but it will also activate implicit political frames that impugn the original judgment of "the people" in 2008. I think the result might be that we'll see something like an inversely proportional relationship-- the more the GOP runs now on "Obama is really screwing up the country" the more they encourage moves that force a decision on the part of the voters in 2012: they could either embrace a kind of Burkean perspective by incongruity and decide they screwed up when they voted for Obama, or they could double down on their support for him. Given the human tendency against humility and towards ego, my suspicion is that 2012 could still be very good for the Democrats. Especially because once the GOP owns at least the House, any continued failures on the part of the Obama administration will be understood as the GOP's fault. Because if the presidency has a disproportionately powerful role in our symbolic economy, anytime they fail to do something the logical reason can't relate to the president's weakness or failing--it will more likely be written up as something external.

The GOP's "America Speaking Out" Program

2010-07-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Something that I've been focusing on a lot (and blogging about some) is the fundamental tension that drives the American political scene, the tension between Republicanism and Democracy that is woven into our own founding myths. Jennifer Mercieca's book Founding Fictions examines some of the ways that the contradictory character of the American political system has been forgotten, as we find ourselves in a political scene that is discussed as a democracy but functions mostly as a Republic.

What makes this tension interesting from a rhetorical standpoint is that the democratic narrative overdetermines much of the popular and media reading of governmental action. There are a lot of potential reasons for this explanation but perhaps the one that makes the most sense to me is this: individuals (particularly individuals sensitized and raised in a liberal culture that promotes individualism as a central value, if not a sinthome that helps a whole social narrative cohere), do not like to be told that they are wrong. Because at any moment as individual imagines their understanding to be one intelligible to a broader audience (this is the act of imagination necessary to formulate something like "the people", unless we are talking about an avowed polemicist) individuals are not encouraged to approach their own viewpoints with humility: instead, they conceive of their own thoughts and opinions as brilliant flowers that deserve to bloom.

Indeed, a democracy that purely celebrates "the people" encourages us to imagine that these opinions can explode in full bloom. We don't, of course, have to go very fall down the ol' linguistic turn to see that there is a problem with this belief: Chantal Mouffe, for example, argues in The Democratic Paradox and elsewhere with Ernesto Laclau that interpreting political discourse as a product of agonistic conflict is preferable to interpreting conflict as a clash between competing truth claims that are resolvable by some objective judgment. This is because there is no external arbitator capable of resolving the competing truth claims--we are, to some extent inhabting a relative space. This is somewhat liberating, however, because the understanding that we occupy a space where "everything is permitted so nothing is permitted" at least frees subjects to make arguments/produce opinions that are not "determined in the last instance" by some calcified or hardened social structure whose force or power masquerades as an essential or guaranteed truth.

To return to Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, it may be that out task in a rhetorical democratic republic is to figure out how citizens might begin to understand themselves as humble combatants rather than figures who posess an absolute truth. One might counter this assertion by pointing to The Human Condition's aggressive defense of agonistic political space to prove that humility is not a desired trait because it might act to discourage individuals from attempting to write their name into history by producing a lasting force. To put it into Mouffian terms we might ask the question: how do we facilitate the transition from antagonism to agonism without abolishing the difference that drives both?

The benefits of highlighting the republican aspects of our government are clear in light of this objection: republican governments affirmatively defend that some kind of line must be drawn between the people and their representatives while democratic modes of thinking defer the willingness to make a judgment, relying instead upon an inchoate/spectral idea (for example, a Rawlsian "public reason") to tie up any loose ends with regards to harmonizing the social. Bringing this back to Arendt's argument in On Revolution (as explicated by Andreas Kalyvas) we see the danger in promulgating something like a theory of public reason: public reason, because it refuses to claim to be made out of a decision and instead to constantly aid and abet public formation, might be the source of just as much violence as forms of acknowledged decisionism, but rather than humbly acknowledging this decisionistic character of thought and action, something like public reasons consistently denies that it is the product of decisionistic thinking because its virtues arise from its ability to exist external from critique/the social--if it were revealed as decisionism, the reasons to prefer it would fade to black.

Recall how the roots of rightist populism are in the mid 20th century anti-Communist movement: McCarthy, the Birchers, the "get out the vote" Goldwater crowd, and the general creeping suspicious of liberal management as an intellectual tactic that relies on a docile and unthinking public--these roots are visible today in something like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism for example, which is something of a modern bible for the NRO crowd.

The GOP's new "America Speaking Out" program operates according to democratic principles but does on a democratic/republican plane of battle. The program, intended according to Senator John Boehner is intended to give the American people "a megaphone" so that their voice can be heard amidst the hustle and bustle of Washington. The website features a fair number of comments (although some quite clearly are not from conservatives, and instead are both sarcastic and genuine liberal suggestions) and the comments touch on traditionally conservative political positions: reducing federal support for abortions, solutions for illegal immigration, cutting taxes, banning the IRS, etc.

The genius of the plan is, of course, that no one likes to be told that they are wrong. And so with a handy vox populi that generally supports conservative positions, we see an organ for the GOP to position its arguments as unassailable: how dare you disagree with the people! Moreover, this program boxes the Left into a difficult argumentative position: if they don't wish to argue with "the people" they must prove that the voices present on the website are NOT the people or attempt a more nuanced argument that takes into account the plurality of voices in a democracy and then claims to properly sort them. The former argument risks tapping into a sort of intellectual elitism that haughtily disregards "average Americans" (a particularly risky situation given how effectively "elite thinking" has been critiqued by American conservatives since people were skeptical about The End of Ideology etc.) while the latter demands a certain complexity that may not function properly in our digital Twitterverse.

You might say that the mad genius of the "America Speaking Out" initiative is that it continues to insist upon the fundamentally democratic character of America while denying its opponents access to the inventional resources available in a republic. Following Mercieca's work in Founding Fictions, we might hazard that the frame taken up by the conservative strategists behind this initiative is a solidly romantic one--one that believes that a committed people can have their will properly represented by the system. This abolishes the possibility of any ironic distance from the system because of how these discourses circulate: it is never "the President judged the will of the people and found them wanting" but instead it is "the people's voice has again been trampled".

The task for progressives, then, is to figure out just how we might encourage a humility rather than an arrogance in our democratic subjects. How might we encourage people to take a comic perspective about everything that is happening in the political world? And for now I say: how might we do the impossible?

The Curious Case of Journolist

2010-07-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

If you're not up to date on your scandals and media memes, the recent kerfluffle over Journolist, a message board set up to enable communications between left leaning media types, might have missed you. The list first came into national prominence when Dave Weigel, the man on the beat for the Wapo's coverage of the conservative movement, was outed as having said some relatively liberal things on this list. He shortly resigned from his position at the Washington Post, forced out presumably because of the oft-understood and regularly repeated mantra that we expect those people who produce our news to be objective.

Since Weigel's departure, conservatives have taken to this Journolist controversy more and more, pointing to it as evidence of how the media persists in perpetuating forms of liberal bias. At The Corner for example, Daniel Foster points to some leaks from Journolist taken from November 3rd and 4th, 2008, when Obama won the presidency. You can look at them here. (It should also be noted that Weigel's reporting on the Tea Party movement was top notch stuff).

Foster's comment sounds an interesting echo back to a previous topic taken up on this blog: the dispute over who are the true Jacobins on the contemporary American political scene, the progressive liberals who support Barack Obama or the Tea Partiers who want a limited state and lower taxes. Foster says that the revelations from the Journolist "make him feel sad" for the people, because they naively believe that what is occurring is something truly momentous rather than just another banal changing of the guard.

Of course, Foster's own sense of pity (how charitable of him!) only makes sense to an audience capable of refusing to identify with the comments from Journolist. What strikes me in Foster's comments (and indeed, much of the conservative reaction to the Journolist controversy) is that their sense of what journalists ought to be like approximates something like a demand that people in the media ought to function a robots, with a set of opinions and sense of judgments that are completely separate from whatever own personal viewpoints they have.

Imagine engaging in an imaginative reversal: what would the react have been on the right to a McCain victory? Do we imagine they would have shrugged their shoulders and gone "well, we've got another Republican president, but I am not very excited about the victory because it's just another president". I have a feeling that most would admit to, if not a euphoria, a sense of satisfaction and happiness that individuals whom they genuinely believe would make America worse off did not control the Presidency.

I contend that the most important rhetorical marker of the difference in the Right and Left responses is that the left responses reek of a kind of individualism that conservative responses to victory annhilate by couching the legitimacy of a conservative victory with recourse to the rhetoric of "the people". For example, in a 2004 NRO column Victor Davis Hansn celebrates the victory of George W. Bush because it represents the victory of the will of "real Americans" over a media and academic elite who tried to load the dice in the election. Conservative celebration of the win is allowed but only if it does so by suboordinating the importance of the victory to the role of "the people" in producing it, as in this passage, where he argues:

"The East and West Coasts and the big cities may reflect the sway of the universities, the media, Hollywood, and the arts, but the folks in between somehow ignore what the professors preach to their children, what they read in the major newspapers, and what they are told on TV. The Internet, right-wing radio, and cable news do not so much move Middle America as reflect its preexisting deep skepticism of our aristocracy and its engineered morality imposed from on high."

Hanson's comments track appropriately with the old right wing populist meme that "the people" should be championed because they know better than an elite and technocratic will which emerges from some higher power. This is the theory that drives Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and has animated conservative political activism since Daniel Bell and Richard Hofstader were writing in the 50's. What is curious is that this positions that desire of "the people" to continue as they always have been as the sort of conservative break on the overreaches of progressivism (Goldberg's "Democracy of the Dead", reference in a previous post makes sense here). The central tension that informs the conservative desire to turn the comments found in the leaks from Journolist into comments that come from a liberal media elite rather than a series of thoughts that represent something "American" is that an implicit criteria for what are and are not acceptable political viewpoints must operate. So what really troubles me about Foster's comments are not that he opposes the presidency of Barack Obama (which is fine, democracies are full of disagreement) but the pity that he feels for those who believe in Barack Obama, especially given the content of some of these leaks.

Two examples:

"HENRY FARRELL, GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY: I had to close my office door yesterday because I was watching YouTube videos of elderly African Americans saying what this meant to them and tearing up."

"HAROLD POLLACK, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO: I am awed by the responsibility we have taken on. Tomorrow a desperately ill African-American woman will present at my university hospital for care, and she will be turned away. She will expect us to live up to what we feel tonight. So we’ve got a lot to live up to."

What, exactly, is so sad about these comments? One possibility is that they Foster believes they are disingenuous--but of course, if Journolist is full of disingenuous comments then the media is less "left leaning" than most conservatives hold. Another possibility is that Foster finds it sad that people have channeled important civic feelings/sentiments through the figure of Barack Obama, rather than expressing them concretely in some other mechanism. Due respect to Foster, but the president plays a disproportionately important role in America's symbolic economy. George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan remain considerably more common targets for left leaning pols than say, the grim spectre of Trent Lott or Tom DeLay. Similarly, most Tea Party rallies focus on the ills of Obama rather than pursuing scathing critiques of Harry Reid or Russ Feingold. To imagine that people should not invest themselves in who the president is demands of citizens a way of thinking about politics that is almost alien, if not entirely foreign.

Additionally, many of the people presented in these dispatches are writers who never claim to be non-partisan. Ezra Klein is a progressive, Alyssa Rosenberg acknowledges that her private sentiments defer from her public performance, and even Spencer Ackerman's "YES WE DID!" presumes that journalists shouldn't be allowed to have a rooting interest in politics.

Essentially, I think Foster wants our journalistic community to be a bunch of robots. This robot media would reflect objectively upon politics, and would never take time to have a separate person that reflected or thought about politics. I understand that there is a separate argument, which is that Journolist was a forum where people intentionally speculated or strategized about how they could bend certain stories to the left. That is its own issue, and deserves a separate post. But you know, it shows a remarkably lack of faith in democracy to operate in an environment where you trust that people with viewpoints are incapable of bracketing those viewpoints when telling stories or presents issues. Democracy is, in fact, founded upon our ability to persuade others of our viewpoints by understanding that there is a difference in perspective that must somehow be bridged through persuasion or argument. Foster assumes that the beliefs of the reporters are a material and ideologically guaranteed barrier to the formulation of anything like a Perelmanian universal audience. Such a belief has the effect of calcifying political difference and making it function like a natural given rather than a constraint that a rhetor is capable of manipulating.

Many sports journalists comment that covering sports makes them incapable of having a rooting interest anymore--that their job and the demand for professionalism ultimately covers over any latent fandom they may be dealing with. In politics, of course, the stakes are not wins and losses but rather lives and security. We are, it seems, in danger of demanding of our reporters that they should do things that they cannot do. Foster is pitying these people for being human, for being invested in something that gives them meaning. That says something curious about the right's monopoly over reason/rationality in public political forums.

Why Lebron to Miami Is So Infuriating (To Some)

2010-07-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

When it comes to tonight's much ballyhooed Lebron James announcement, the internet tubes are afire with vitriol and vengeance when it comes to James. Sifting through the objections, I find two of them to be fairly legitimate:

1. Lebron is screwing Cleveland, an economically ravaged and sports-abused city whose history is so depressing that its lake once caught on fire. If you wanted to sleep with a Cleveland sports icon before Lebron you might have to choose this guy. The Drive, The Fumble, the team leaving for Baltimore unceremoniously, Mike Fratello's boredom infused offense, several years of Tyrone Hill, Joe Table's blown save. You've heard it all before (and probably today in Bill Simmons' column @ ESPN).

2. Lebron is somehow turning his free agency into even MORE of a ridiculous media spectacle, holding the world hostage to "The Decision" show tonight in what amounts to a form of highway robbery committed ad nauseam on the nation's attention span.

I find the first objection appealing but ultimately unpersuasive. Top athletes should want to win titles. We all mourn the loss of teams in their prime that lost their shot at immortality because a key player left elsewhere to pursue a better income (as a Titans fan this is how I feel about Albert Haynesworth, but more paradigmatic examples include any number of college sports teams that see players leave early for the pros, the departure of Barry Bonds from the Pittsburgh Pirates prior to the 1993 season, or even Tracy McGrady's departure from what was a completely loaded Toronto Raptors team almost ten years ago). But we rarely mourn players that leave their established teams to win titles (Ray Bourque, Ray Allen, Kevin Garnett, and even the hated Alex Rodriguez was somewhat redeemed by winning a title with the Yankees) because the idea of wanting to win is so intimately connected to the sporting ethos. Ultimately, Kevin Garnett wanted out of Minnesota and we got that: playing with Gary Trent, Ervin Johnson (no, not that one!), and Trenton Hassell gets old because you know you're not going to win the big one. The space of sports does not give us a coherent argument against Lebron James unless we are judging his decision to depart outside of the realm of sport, by making something like a political judgment about his role in Cleveland's economy. Within the frame of sport, the only objection we might have relates to something like an idea of "loyalty" to your institution or franchise but this language is unintelligible in a sporting world where free agency has now been a fact of life in the four major sports for at least 25 years, if not more. Sports are more about winning then about location.

The second objection is correct, but does not relate to the content of James's decision. We all agree he is making an egostistical spectacle of himself. Fine, but thats not a reason to be angry he leaves for Miami. Its a reason to be mad that the 24/7 media cycle and your twitter feed and the Boys and Girls Club of Greenwich Connecticut, or whatever, keeps coming up.

No, I think the anger is mostly a result of how, if the "Miami Thrice" rumor is true, the element of luck has been abolished by the agency of the athlete free agents. What I mean is: we consume sports because there is an intrinsic element of chance at almost all levels of the endeavor (this is especially true of basketball, with the draft lottery). Injuries can occur--thats chance. You are born in a certain place and root for a team--thats chance. Some players pan out, others don't (this is in actuality a lot more like skill at judging talent, at least in basketball, but we often think about it as chance unless a number of decisions pile up so high that we feel comfortable calling it numbskullery). Always, in sport, we are presented with indestructable forces and moveable objects. The Greatest Show on Turf against the Patriots. Namath's no-chance Jets against the Baltimore Colts. The plucky Detroit No-Names (relatively) against the Los Angeles Lakers Pu-Pu-Platter of doom in 2004. The Buffalo sabres repeated attempts to ride hot goaltending to a Stanley Cup. The Marlins agains the Yankees in 2003. Boston's incredible win against the Yankees in the 2004 ALCS is noteworth, because it indicated that no matter the material equality's seeming insurmountability (3-0 lead) we expect the impossible, and it can still happen (interesting, of course, how easy it was for the narrative to whitewash Boston's own incredible payroll and resources, far dwarfing those of a team like the Milwaukee Brewers).

We consume sports so that we might see the exceptional happen. Unless we root for the Yankees, the Celtics, the Lakers, the Jordan-era Bulls, the Belichik era Patriots, or the Detroit Red Wings, we are hoping for the unexpected to occur. We are hoping that what occurs will not be what we think will happen. "That's why they play the game" is the ultimate trite statement about a sporting event but in its essence it gets to why we consume sport--we do so because what it provides to us is not guaranteed by anything except for the ingeneuity, talents, and skills of those involved in the contest.

The problem with this assemblage of talent is not that it is unprecedented (some of the loaded Cowboys teams of the nineties, or say the Showtime Lakers or eighties Celtics all had as much raw talent) but that it has been assembled but through shrewd GM dealings (at least, not in our imagination) but instead is simply the product of the will of the players. That's it. There is no natural barrier to this occurring. No trades, draft dealings, nothing short of either Toronto or Cleveland winning a title could stop it (if it happens). It creates a sense of inevitability and a foreboding about the future of sports on an era no just of free agency, but FREE AGENCY, a truly meaningful possibility for players to unlock all of their potentials with the players they want to play with. And we have no tools to attack this decision in our existing sporting vocabulary because the most important thing in sports is winning. When an amazing player doesn't win a title he's in some ways a failure (Dan Marino, Charles Barkley, and countless others). But now that we see a player willing to do whatever possible to win we are confronted with the seedy underside of our demand that the players focus only on winning: that winning is at the end an individual goal that occurs within the framework of a team, rather than a team goal that suboordinates the individual at every step. Yes, egos and individuality must be suboordinated within a team for a championship victory to happen, but we call them the Jordan Bulls and not the Pippen Bulls or the Rodman Bulls.

So the "Miami Thrice" option presents a problem not just because of how this Heat team might dominate (which they quite possibly would), but also because the idea of competition is itself threatened in a world where all athletes unite in order to win the big one. We are frightened by the prospect of seeing only All-Star games from the conference semis on, in no small measure because it seems unlikely that the stars would ever choose to go win in a place like Sacramento or Cleveland instead of Miami or LA. Rather than equally distributing chance amongst all the teams in a league (Wait til' next year!) the probabilities of victory are pre-ordained to only include a certain few teams. There are, after all, only a certain few superstars and you need them to win a title. When their finite numbers are concentrated rather than dispersed we become afraid that the possibilities, the potential for victory and surprise and upset are now scarce, and will be forever scarce because there is nothing irrational (an economic protection in the local or nationalist sense, an emotional bond so strong that a player stays AGAINST his own interests) to stay the existence and production of a super-rational and highly efficient sports market where winners win, losers lose, and Ray Bourque would have left Boston in 1993.

Because ultimately, star athletes in their prime stay where they are for a tautological yet fulfilling reason: their presence where they are makes the team they are with, in some ways, a conceivable championship contender. With James, Cleveland is a contender but not overwhelmingly so. In imagining James to Miami with Bosh and Wade, we see an athlete calculating not in totalities (some chance vs. no chance) but instead making a calculation at the margins--that while Cleveland might offer some chance of a title, Miami's is better. Of course, we always want our stars to want to win. Why else do we hate players like Monta Ellis, and what better explains a lot of the vitriol towards Allen Iverson (well, that and race), players who put up great numbers but can't win? We consistently indict these players for not putting their team first. The assumption, of course, is that the team they need to put first is THEIR team, and not some other one. But when the desire for a championship that has been created by a demand that ANY great athlete "win the big one" is so great that a player finds themselves criticized on that front, we fans and commentators who worried that "Marino just didn't know how to win the Super Bowl" should not be surprised that we are now being hoisted on our own petards. Because ultimately, these guys are competitors. And with the prospect of this decision, that is what we're getting.

Thoughts on the Hudson Institute Symposium on Conservative Populism, Vol. 1

2010-07-07T23:25:00.000-07:00

The Hudson Institute, a conservative leaning think tank, hosted a symposium on the prospects for a conservative populism in America. As you might well imagine, this was like Christmas in June for me, and the transcript is finally out. So hopefully in my next few blog posts I will go through the transcript of this report and see what I can see. First, we begin with something of a benediction from Jonah Goldberg, National Review editor and columnist, as he reflects on the possibilities of a populist conservatism:

"Now, it is true that it’s a difficult position for me to take, because for a long time I have been very anti-populist. I think populism as a historical phenomenon is fairly anti-conservative. It is rooted in this idea that the people can demand whatever they want right now. William Jennings Bryan had this great line where he said, “The people of Nebraska are for free silver, so I am for free silver. I’ll look up the arguments later.” Conservatism is supposed to be, as Chesterton would say, democracy for the dead. There is this idea that we are bound by constitutional order; we are bound by tradition; we are bound by certain eternal truths and eternal verities and conceptions of how things should be done. And populism tends to just want to sweep all of that aside. But I don’t think that that’s the populism that we have today. And I don’t think it’s necessarily a contradiction that conservatives embrace the populism that we have today. The populism that we have today, as Mr. Armey was saying moments ago, is dedicated to not demanding that their immediate passions be satisfied by government, but they’re in fact demanding that government be reoriented back to its proper role and scope. And that is a very different thing than the populism that we saw lead to national socialism or fascism in Europe. It’s very different, in fact, from the American populist movements that began in 1870s and moved on. It is in many ways a weirdly anti-populist populism, sort of saying that the government should get out of the people’s business and stop trying to satisfy their immediate passionate desires and instead go back into the proper oriented role. "

Goldberg's read here seems fairly spot on. He positions the current wave of conservative populism in opposition to the traditional populism of say, William Jennings Bryan, noting that the character of previous populist movements in America was of a sort where the movement understood that the government was to engage in a sort of mimetic play with the will of "the people". Following Goldberg, traditional populism arises from a disjuncture between what the people want and the government is doing. Typical and straightforward--populist movements arise when popular sentiment wants the government to do something different. Nothing rocket sciencey there, although Goldberg is properly associating populism with the Left.

Indeed, one need only look back to our friend Richard Weaver to see that Jonah Goldberg, unknowingly, agrees with Weaver on the characteristics of conservative vs. liberal arguments--that the conservative argues from eternal values while the liberal argues from circumstance. This is why Goldberg, borrowing a neat formulation with which I was unfamiliar, notes that conservatism is a "democracy for the dead", a structure that enables the people that have come before to perform in the same manner as the people who currently exist. In this manner, the conservative populism we see today is no contradiction, to Goldberg, because, as he implies, what these new populists are arguing for is merely a return to the old state of affairs rather than a radical change from some long established understanding.

Whats important to secure the persuasive force of Goldberg's arguments is that the conservative populism have a monopoly on the true story of American history, and their relationship to as its avatars or vanguard. The idea is that we need to return to a truly imited government. In the abstract, I could see Goldberg's argument developing in some pretty interesting ways (indeed, elsewhere in the piece he name drops Rand Paul as a figure whose actual conservatism is rather threatening when it appears in public). The problem, of course, is that even a charitable reading of Goldberg falls apart when we try and square it with much of the actual content of the Tea Party movements rallies and demands. The generic demands (less government, fewer taxes, more freedom) can only be understand as "conservative" if one uses an especially literal interpretation or understanding of time to argue that the things which came before should be privelged simply because they came before. In this way, something like the New Deal can be sidestepped when its existence proves that the body of history is somewhat less than friendly to the most polemical aspects of the Tea Party cause.

One of course need only refer to something like Arendt's understanding of the political to see that its not the linear march of time that most important maps existing political hegemony, but rather it is seeing what deeds continue to live on in the works of humanity that testifies to what tradition really is. After all, in On Revolution Arendt is saddened that America has lost the revolutionary spirit, and what she means by this is not that we have lost the literal notions produced for us by the founders but rather we have lost the sense of comic humility that accompanies the possibility for constant criticism that ought to be attached to all foundings, and was found at the time of the American revolution.

To me, what's interesting is not to differentiate this current wave of conservatism populism from previous "leftist" populist movements in the U.S. Instead, I think its more interesting to read them for their similarities, for the way that both sets of movements register a sort of discomfort with the existing political landscape, for how the positions of the aggrieved are not naturally occupied by one class or sort of people but can instead be taken up by whomever want them if they are willing to fashion an argument about being on the wrong end of a political hegemony.

Also striking, of course, is Goldberg's argument about how the government needs to stop kowtowing to the passions of the people. All well and good, I think, theoretically. But of course one cannot deny that the Tea Party movement is very passionate, and that signifiers of the Revolution carry with them a certain emotional or affective charge that seems rather disinterested in depoliticizing the public. What I mean is: with limited government, the passions of some people will still be allowed to make hay, because the government will still remain responsive to those of "the people" who want the government to do less rather than more. So I guess my open question to Jonah would be: if the proper role of government is to do less, how much "less" is enough" Tax rollbacks? Ending social security? Eviscerating infrastructure programs? No more stimulus packages? At what point do major chunks of America's history need to be read as "improper" and at what point are they justified?

Richard Weaver, the Argument from Circumstance, and the Tea Party

2010-07-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Richard Weaver is a curious figure in the history of rhetoric. A rare academic figure in the humanities, for sure, owing to his conservative political commitments, Weaver is considered to be a somewhat influential figure for 20th century conservatives in America. His Ethics of Rhetoric has an awful lot to offer students of the discipline, and his political leanings should not obscure the positive and useful content found in his work.

His excellent essay "Edmund Burke and the Argument from Circumstance" found in the Ethics provides an interesting intellectual and rhetorical history with which we might read the contemporary machinations of the Tea Party. While Edmund Burke is typically considered a father figure for modern conservatism, Weaver seeks to indict Burke's politics as something far more liberal. The most important index, he argues, of a person's worldview can be found in the type of argument they make.

Weaver points to 3 different types of arguments: arguments from genus, arguments from similitude, and arguments from circumstance. Arguments from genus make claims about the nature of things, and moving from these facts, then proceed to produce and persuade about choices given such facts. Arguments from similitude make comparisons between like things: these arguments are an important space for rhetoricians particularly to examine because in making a meeting of reality to the imagination we engage in this process of figuration, of making like things like. Finally, the argument from circumstance argues that what is to be done must be determined by the urgent and clear reality of the situation.

Weaver tracks Burke's work, and concludes that Burke often favors arguments from circumstance. For example, in the case of the American revolution the best solution he can provide is one in which England lets the colonies go but hopes and encourages them to pay some sort of voluntary fee back to England. Similarly, his famous indictment of the French Revolution operates by presuming that the already existing conditions of France were of a noble sort of stability that ought to be respected and honored. Both of these are arguments from circumstance, rather than arguments which proceed from figuring out what the "real nature" of humanity of political organization is.

Weaver makes the claim that the argument from circumstance is a properly liberal argument, because it does not rely on the strength of calcified essences or established institutions. The less well established political actors should tend to make arguments from circumstance because the strength of institutional history and collective memory (articulated to something like a Platonic form for Weaver) are bedrocks of conservative thinking. It is the job of the liberal (this corresponds somewhat with the leftist or social radical in Weaver's writing) to articulate why the conditions of the moment are so disastrous that they warrant a break with the history and tradition embodied within conservative thought.

Standing within our contemporary political milieu, Weaver's further analysis of the American Whig party and the collapse of the Republican party after Lincoln's assassination are hauntingly prescient. As Weaver argues, "a party whose only program is an endorsement of the status quo is destined to go to pieces whenever the course of events brings a principle strongly to the fore" (p. 79). As the early Whigs stood for nothing more than a vague kind of elite "political awesome" 20 years after America's founding, so the reformulated Republican party after Lincoln succeeded for a bit owing to the good will it accumulated from having ended slavery. But both politics ultimately stood for nothing, and without a content were doomed to lose out to opposing politicians who could articulate their vision of American to what Weaver calls "charismatic terms" (these charismatic terms are basically ideographs, by the way, and it is easy to see Weaver's influence all throughout Michael Calvin McGee's work) like freedom and liberty.

In the next chapter, Weaver makes a powerful case that argument from definition is the most powerful political argument, because it owns a sort of ontic (his word!) status that enables it to control the vision of the world espoused by its rhetor. Seizing on the rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, Weaver argues that his persistent committment to insisting on a broad definition of human (to include blacks) facilitated a confrontation between the ideal reality of slavery's ideology (a simple hierarchy and human and non-human) and the everyday entailments of slavery's real enactment (slaves could follow orders, complete complex tasks, and perform very human acts generally). By situating his argument within an institutional tradition (the committment to human equality found in the Declaration of Independence) Lincoln's argumentative savvy helped to win the day (along with a war).

The campaign narrative produced by Obama and his staff, and the fallout from his electoral victory presents itself to us in the form of a kind of libertarianism that cannot speak its own name. After all, the Tea Partiers want less government, fewer taxes, fewer handouts, more freedom, and "their country back". It is not hard to detect in their canny references to revolution, in the signifiers of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin that show up in their campaign ads, and in their visible and public showing of selves, a strong discontent with where the country is at this moment. Their discontent, however, struggles to articulate itself in much more than a demand for lower taxes or a series of negative arguments against the Obama administration. Republicans who actually produce policy proposals (Paul Ryan's budget, or Bob Bennett's bi-partisan health care reform proposal) do not find their specific proposals often taken up by the Tea Partiers. Even if the rejection of these proposals is principled (and I hold out the possibility that it is) the principles underwriting these rejections are closer to a form of libertarianism than George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism", whatever that was.

Weaver writes that there is a principled form of conservatism that could exist, but in the 1950's it does not appear. What appears in its place is a general fear of communism, and a host of related arguments from circumstance that suboordinate principle to place. Moving out of this space, into one where "principled" arguments may be made is crucial, in his view, for conservatism to become a powerful and legitimate political force again. It must have a "moral idea of freedom" or defend a certain "vision of a nation". But in a world where the New Deal is a known fact in collective memory, where people want their Medicare once they understand what it is, what sort of national vision have the Tea Partiers produced? I submit that it is a negative republic, one built on a resentement and fear of the Other, either internal or external. All republics, of course, are founded on such fears. But not all of them are negative, some at least augur the possibility of a day when a positive something or other might mean for the movement. For whatever reason, however, the version of libertarianism that animates the Tea Partier's spirit has not yet appeared as a fully fleshed Being in public. Can it? Or has American social space been so radically reconfigured by the collapse of the "Southern States" electoral coalition that sustained, along with the fear of Communism and terrorism, conservative political primacy since 1968 that a seriously radical ideological restructuring is coming down the pike? Richard, Weaver, despite his conservative leanings, might say yes.

How Glenn Beck Works

2010-06-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

I'm not all that interested in spending a lot of time using contemporary notions of argumentation theory to analyze a figure like Glenn Beck, who by all accounts exists in order to demonstrate that the possibility of using something like a typical rubric to "grade" his performance will be a task forever in search of anything more than a failing grade. Clearly, Beck is not interested in completing arguments in a way that would make Stephen Toulmin deliver something like the worlds driest golf clap. And I want to say, the left is no great shakes in this regard at all times (Kos and certain contributors to the Huffington Post, I'm looking in your direction). But to ignore him seems risky, given that plenty of arguments that don't supply premises and work off an affective force have done lots of naughty (and good!) work in the realm of politics.

So, surprise surprise, Beck operates like a conspiracy theorist. No earthshaking revelation there. But he is not just a conspiracy theorist--he is a victimized one. Today's episode, which focused on unions, was a great example through and through. Beck opens the show by tearing into labor unions for being exclusive and power hungry organizations. He then quite carefully notes that he is mostly targeting the leaders of the labor unions, as those are the one who are most likely to be communists and power hungry (he easily conflates these two perspectives together in a way that's easy to follow for anyone who understands either Jonah Goldberg's fascism enthymeme or the history of any number of leftist regimes in the 20th century as a proper tale of the failure of socialism).

Beck dedicates the entire show to unions. First he does some armchair labor history, tracing the relationship of unionization to two negatively valenced phenomena--race and violence. He traces the terrible history of racial exclusion that underlied the rather protectionist sentiments espoused by labor unions (he's particularly fond of people from 1877 in this regard). And indeed, not much to argue with--plenty of unions did plenty of incredibly racist things, especially to the Chinese to name just one example that Beck really likes. Beck also shows some classic American art and renderings of labor struggles from the late 19th century, mentioning the death and destruction that accompanied the agitation of these workers.

What makes Beck's theories run is that he does not provide the viewer any pause as he talks to consider the important question of "whose" violence and racism. His performance stipulates very limited and conventional (we might say conservative, in the Richard Weaver sense) understandings of these phenomena. Take, for example, his argument about the racism of the labor union. He's not wrong--but it would be nice to see him square the brutal rhetoric he aims at the labor unions with the fawning and love he directs towards America generally, a country whose history of racism, even conservatively defined, is damning at worst and troubling at best. Surely slavery is not a lesser offense than a labor unions attempt to disrupt the workdays of Chinese cooleys. What's more, labor unions are non-governmental organizations. The history of private discrimination in this country is extensive as well-yet Beck seizes on unions. Again, unions did racist things. Then again, so did basically most every institution in America at one point or the other. Beck's selection of the union as the site to articuate his arguments about race tell us something interesting.

So to do his claims that the danger of unions is that they risk violence. His descriptions of the violence wrought by unions rely on the abilities of image to short circuit the capacity for rational argumentation in an engaged audience--he shows some renderings of beatings and riots and then says, to paraphrase "unions caused this violence, violence!" never mentioning that quite often the victims of the violence were union members themselves who were beaten to death by strikebreakers hired by such non-union friendly folks as Henry Frick. In this was Beck produces the violence of the time as an illegitimate effect of the labor union's agitation, pushing aside the content of the claims made by the laborers in favor of an outcome based assessment that delegitimates their efforts.

Both his major points about racism and violence fold into the last part of the show where he makes the claim that contemporary labor unions in America are actually shadow organizations for the great stalking horse of "multiculturalism", that hegemonic formation of difference that seems to know at every step just how to destroy white privilege, and, by the commutative property of crypto-fascist Fox news shows, America. In this movement Beck's argument shows its savvy because it produces an injured America as the victim of the same history of labor movement racism. Rather than understanding labor unions as organizations bent on helping people get a fair share of what they produce, labor unions are power hungry organization's whose somewhat naive belief in th fatuous notion of "equality" empowers them to assert the necessity of giving in to "other" people to the point that the current status quo will one day be unrecognizable. So the history of the labor union's racism is not just some bizarre enthymeme but rather carefully and quietly encourages the audience to read what movements are doing today as another form of exclusion rather than equality. Of course, what Beck needs the audience to insert is the notion that something like "Americanness" exists in the status quo, that is properly rewards hard work, and that it is a bedrock of stability and goodness. Audiences, of course, do a good job of inserting these premises, as 1994 and the year of the Angry White Male do a good job of demonstrating.

It is also true that "multiculturalism", as a movement, must not include white people for the argument to work. So rather than allowing for the possibility that "white" is one category included under the multicultural umbrella, Beck's argument demands that multiculturalism operate in an exclusive and dichotomous relationship with whiteness--we are presented with a forced choice--one or the other. References to socialism, Marxism, the socially conscientious work of Piven and Cloward, and violence all act to implicitly prop up this argument--after all, we defeated socialism/Marxism in 1989, and we do politics rather than allow violence to exist in our public sphere. These references produce multiculturalism as an antagonistic and threatening formation rather than as something which is potentially inclusive and consistent with democratic aims.

So we have Glenn Beck (no accident that he often cries and wails, with much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments) here making arguments to protect American values from a dangerous socialist multiculturalism embodied in labor unions. These unions are out to make America into a victim--to derail its greatness by levelling of all people under the "benign" sign of equality, which, in Beck's formulation, is dangerous because, to quote nearly verbatim "people are not equal. Get used to it!" He then rattles off a number of jobs where the workers make more money than most of his audience members. He does not, of course, mention his own. It is, however, at this moment that I found Beck his most persuasive--because he anticipated a potential counter to his argument, and then responded preemptively (everyone is not equal!). At least he is honest about his exceptionalism in this instance. What he ignores is that unions typically don't claim that they will make everyone fabulously rich--they generally agitate for living wages, reasonable increases in standards of living, and measures that make something beyond mere subsistence (but not radical luxury) obtainable.

Forms of privilege repeatedly exist because people declare that the reality that we inhabit is a reality not structured by forms of power and luck but instead is a reality that is the product of some sort of invisible hand that produces certain life situations as proper indexes of the worth of certain humans. For Beck's argument to work, the place where multiculturalism and labor unions want to take us must be unnatural, a zone where the distortion of "real value" is so great that we would find ourselves not free to realize our own dreams and potentials but instead subjugated to values that demand we conform to external impositions of what is right and wrong. This assumes that where we are now is also not the product of such a power relation, and the arguments of Beck (and his Tea Party bretheren) often strain so hard to make this point that it becomes easier to think that the strength and conviction of their position derives not from a certain sort of metaphysical correctness, but rather from a deep seated anxiety that the idea of "America" which they are protecting is something that is fleeting, if it ever existed at all.

The Politics of "Breaking Bad", Or, How I Learned to Love Victimized White Masculinity

2010-06-17T04:41:00.000-07:00

I've been riveted by the AMC series Breaking Bad since last spring. This post will address plot developments, many from this season, so, if you are still planning on watching the show but haven't yet, stay away for there be spoilers here, ye matey.

We are, it seems, in a television era of the anti-hero. HBO helped start and perfect the trend--Tony Soprano and Jimmy McNulty were two of the most seductive and yet simultaneously troubled leading characters of recent memory. Showtime's Dexter is not centered on what you would call a "good" guy although there is a perverse morality there, an even darker shade of what we see from McNulty in the fifth season of The Wire. Mary Louise Parker's character on Weeds stands out as one of a few female anti-heroes in this mold. AMC boasts two contenders for this anti-hero mantle: the womanizing, dapper, and self-interested Don Draper of Mad Men and Breaking Bad's Walter White. White stands out to me from the other men on this list because, when the series begins, he seems perfectly average--he is a science teacher, rather than a mob boss, an advertising executive, or a cop.

Walter has a pretty and smart wife, Skyler, a good kid struggling with MS, named Walter Jr., and a brother-in-law in the DEA. Oh, and cancer. To make a long story short, Walt's family is struggling to make the payments, so Walt does what any high school chemistry teacher with an exceptional background would do--he starts making meth with one of his old students, Jesse Pinkman. Initially Walt does it to make ends meet, and to provide for his family once he is gone. But a funny thing happens once Walt's body beats the cancer--he doesn't stop making meth. He, in fact, becomes obsessed with how "cooking" is his own art form, a way for him to make his name in the world, to take his exceptional education and mix his labor with goods to really produce something. This decision is contextualized by some backstory we receive in the first two seasons about Walt's involvement with what is now a highly successful company, which he apparently left on bad terms and before it made it big.

Once Walt's wife finds out he's a drug producer, she immediately takes steps to expel him from her and his children's life. Quite legitimately, I might add. He has brought all sorts of potential legal trouble to his home, not to mention the violence and risk associated with the drug trade. Yet persistently, on message boards, Facebook statuses, casual conversations--there is a coterie of the shows fans who continue to identify with Walter White, and cheer his drug dealing alter ego ("Heisenberg", one of the shows funniest gags). Moreover, even if you are not someone who actively roots for Walter, there is certainly an element of identification with Walter White that enables people to continue to enjoy the show even once Walt has really "broken bad".

But really, what is noble and ok about what Walt has done? He has a chance to stop cooking once he is cancer free. It is carefully and clearly revealed that "I'm doing it for my family" is really just another excuse for Walter to continue to adopt his Heisenberg persona, and stroke his own ego in the process. Walt is repeatedly confronted with the collateral damage of his decision (the threats to his marriage, the preposterous plane crash to end season 2, Combo's death, Jesse's traumas) yet continues to cook.

I contend that we should be completely revolted by Walter White's actions. Yet our ability to consume the show and enjoy it testifies to something like Walter in many of us. Let me give an example--you would probably not be that interested in watching a movie about a serial killer told from the serial killer's point of view. Something like the story of John Wayne Gacy told from his perspective presumably would offer little to us for two reasons: 1) the "simple" pathologies of serial killers are the sorts of things we prefer to experience externally, and probably can only understand externally because we ourselves are not serial killers and moreover, defines ourselves positively over and against "that sort" of being--we're very serious about the importance of categories like killer and criminal have in defining our own normalcy or something like it (though the upcoming film version of The Killer Inside Me has some potential to operate inside and outside these categories), and 2. a serial killer's world would be extremely boring, all pathology and no grey area or nuance--at best anyone who enjoyed consuming it would be a fan or Hostel or some such torture-porn drivel.

Back to our friend Walter White. He has blood on his hands. He has violated his family's trust. He is wanted by the Mexican cartel. He is continuously complicit in enabling Jesse's abusive behavior. His actions indrectly lead to Hank's paralysis in season three. "Mr. White", as Jesse calls him, is a bad dude. Sure, he drives a nifty Pontiac SUV, has a neat house, cute baby, had to beat cancer, all that stuff. But at the end of the day, his actions are indefensible to even a light, relative morality. Killing criminals is one thing, but not his only crime.

I contend that Walt as a character is only intelligible to the viewer within the frame of the American Dream. There have been some interesting studies done on the opinions that people have about tax policy. One reason why tax increases on the upper class remain somewhat unpopular is because a lot of people imagine that even if they are not currently well off, they will be one day, and they don't want the government taking their wealth. Moreover, American culture is very, very bad at teaching people to be happy with what they have. And hey, thats's capitalism--one needs to not be satisfied with one's position because that lack of satisfaction is what produces the drive to innovation and ingenuity that ultimately underwrites advances in technology and civilization. We need to be dissatisfied because that dissatisfaction produces the motivation for more labor to occur. I'm not saying its bad or good--just trying to map that model for a minute, to show how Walt's actions might only make sense to us through that frame.

Walter White is not wealthy, but once he beats the cancer he should be able to go back to work and the family could make it. His continual insistence that Skyler not be the family breadwinner reeks of a kind of lingering idea of a masculine hero capable of providing for his family (notwithstanding Skyler's affair with her boss, the status of which in the anterior is unclear). Walt's son, Walt Jr., has his name but not his working legs. One of the most depressing moments in the show is when Walt is trying to show his son how to drive with only one foot, even though the MS makes it very difficult to do--Walt is insisting that his son be "normal" even in the face of that impossibility. Walt's condescending rants to his high school students, about how he was a world class scientist, indicate a dangerous narcissism. His refusal in season one to take his former partner Elliott's money reflects a debilitating heap of pride and indignance. Walter had an exit strategy that did not involve making meth and he kept doing it.

Walt is not a serial killer but when presented in these terms he is a figure from whom we should seemingly want a lot of distance. To the extent that we identify with Walt we suffer from this "disease of more". To the extent that we revel and cheer his badass actions as the dapper and capped "Heisenberg" we are celebrating his temporary escape from the toil and drudgery of responsibility and normalcy. When we are astonished at the potency and purity of his meth we are not "buying the magic of science" but instead are authorizing his astonishingly puerile ego trips. How far away from the "angry white male" of 1994 are we? Walter lives well above a subsistence level--by all appearances, it is a fine middle class existence, one of privilege relative to the lives of many others in the country. He is getting to live a life that many would envy. Yet Walt is dissatsified. Walt is furious that he is normal. Furious that he is unmarked, his genius unacknowledged, that his personal struggles are not the stuff of legend.

Walt would fit in very nicely at a Tea Party rally.

"Gather Your Armies"

2010-06-15T01:58:00.000-07:00

I'm inspired to post today after seeing this campaign advertisement, for Rick Barber, a conservative candidate in the GOP runoff in an Alabama district. Obviously, its all kinds of awesome, and this is in a midterm year that has already seen the rise of Demon Sheep and the unbelievably hilarious ad in the New Orleans coroner campaign, two all time greats.

Barber's ad is noteworthy, I think, for how it represents a figure really buying into everything that the Tea Party movement stands for--limited government, limited taxation, and something of a libertarian ethos. The ad mostly rails against the Internal Revenue Service, although it drops in some health care reform hating as well. Primarily, the ad is noteworthy for two reasons--in the ad, Barber is having a discussion with some of the Founding Fathers (they appears to be Sam Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin), and the ad ends with one of the figures supporting Barber's rant against the government by pledging his loyalty to Barber's cause with the cry "Gather. Your. Armies."

Josh Marshall over at Talking Points Memo and his people did some good work on this ad, and they tracked down Barber who denies that the advertisement is a call to arms--it could just be "misinterpreted" that way. I'm inclined to say that Barber is not really "lying" per se--he and his campaign staff probably don't think the ad will lead to any real violence, and instead its another attempt to capitalize politically on the happy combination of the myth of the American founding and the voting block of individuals who feel symbolically disenfranchised by the Obama administration's somewhat progressive policy agenda. In general, the unsubtle violence threatened by the ad is closer to the rattle of a spray paint can than a full force political gale. By this I mean--anti-government yahoos and Michigan militia types are probably going to continue to meet, buy assault rifles, and get steamed while watching Glenn Beck whether or not this ad exists. One caveat to this claim is that an anti-government extremist did crash a plane into the IRS building in Austin--its pretty bold of Barber to put out this ad in light of that.

What's interesting about the ad is the striking originalism (in a hyrbid historical/legal sense) that permeates the performance. We've seen explicit echoes of this throughout the right. For example, the idea of constitutional challenges to the health care bill, the persistent attempts of a few people at The Corner to claim that New Deal was both unsuccessful and unconstitutional, and the general argument that a "big government" goes against what the Founders wanted. I am not here to debate what the Founders did or did not want--that work is the job of historians, and frankly, is uninteresting for people interested in how effectively the supposed myths are mobilized within a general public.

No, what's fascinating is the implicit vision of what the Founders stood for that Barber's ad assumes to be the case. Addressing Washington et. al. about the reach and power of the IRS, and to speak to them specifically as small business owners is a rather hilarious conceit. Not to mention the details of what the IRS does that are so objectionable--you need to have records of who is hired, fired, and how much they are paid? Heavens to Betsy (Ross, in this case I'd wager)! Political ads by their very nature trade in reductio and polemic, so I don't want to single out this ad just for being those things (although it certainly is). But what strikes me about the ad, and the candidate's performance, is just how goddam sincere he is. The fact that this ad was made means some people in a campaign think it really will resonate with some people.

To review briefly, we might ask conservative rapper Polatik what the major characteristics of a Tea Party are. To quote his song "That's a Tea Party", they are fiscally responsible, stand for limited government, are "not a race thing", and echo back into the past to summon the spirit of the American founding. I jest, but essentially, what we really know the Tea Party stands for is less government and less government spending, both of which are consistent with a lower overall tax rate. These statements are too general to form much of a positive political platform--and indeed, the Tea Party is mostly into negation, writ large, as seen in the way they flooded the town halls to show their opposition to health care (and yes, I know many of them were civil--negation can be and often is civil).

Not to beat a dead horse (elephant) but the ol' Boston Tea Party and general crankiness of revolutionary America related in part to the "without representation" part of the old "no taxation" complaint. And I guess part of what frustrates/amuses me the most about this ad is that is makes an explicit call for a revolutionary solution to a problem that already has a political avenue for expression--elections allow for "the people" to change their leadership. It really assumes that the audience has little to understanding of any nuance that came out of the revolution. But even the most sanguine and cynical observer would have to admit--most history classes taught it as "no taxation without representation", rather than "only enough taxation to allow for the fulfillment of Nozick's limited state".

Typically, people revolt and protest when their demands and claims are not being satisfied by the dominant political elite. In this sense, the emergence of the Tea Party is perfectly logical and legitimate--the government is dominated by individuals who do think that the government should do things, lots of them, and the Tea Party points to how their is precious little wiggle room for the pragmatists who speak dogmatically to soothe their base (I'm looking at you, Lamar Alexander).

There is no great theoretical point to this post. But I want to make the case that right now, the conservative movement in America is, in terms of argumentative quality, at an absolute nadir not seen since Alf Landon was getting his ass kicked by FDR. We have an oil rig exploded in the Gulf. A massive economic collapse that we are not even two years removed from. Enormous natural disasters in Louisiana and Nashville. A giant volcano that basically shut down all air travel to and from Europe for a while. A housing crisis that is impacting to a great extent the country's population (not including that it also casts doubt on the ability of both the celebrated liberal individual and the bank to judge what is and is not a good investment, a pretty key bit for the whole capitalism operation). And the Tea Party has one overwhelming argument--less government. But its not the government that people fear will make their lives worse--its the prospect that shrimp might cost twice as much, the possibility that some distantly held dividends will collapse, that your 401K becomes a 200.5, in my father's formulation. We are not at the End Times, but these are certainly not the beginnings either. Perhaps not the best time to rail against the government, when plenty of bad news comes from outside the government's purview.

Barber's ad, and the Tea Party proper, is following a well worn conservative tradition--just as Nixon was able to effectively tap into the anger of Southern voters even though his politics were left of George Wallace's, these politicians are using communicative strategies to try and harness some of the anger and popular sentiment to boost their campaigns. Fair enough--its politics, after all. But to think the angry folks now number as Wallace's constituency did in the sixties seems a risky gambit. And frankly, in 1968 "I protect states rights" was a better argument than "the IRS is fascist" is in 2010, if only because racism taps into something deeper and more irrational than various libertarian strains of thought. Yet today a real revolution is truly unthinkable. People may brandish guns at health care summits, and we might yet see another Oklahoma City bombing--but the structural issues that proceeded the secession of the South in the 19th century and the American revolution of the 18th century are nowhere to be found. We instead have a political party grasping for its identity, trying to be something more than a kind of principled resentment. It had a very nice 40 year run or so, this principled resentment.

Nothing throws this into starker relief that the firestorm stoked by Rand Paul's initial claim that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he was then forced to painstakingly walk back after it became clear that opposing such legislation was essentially to deny the importance of a serious lesson of equality embedded in American history. It was a mistake, surely, but as a colleague noted to me, for Paul and his staff only a PR mistake, not a principled one. Indeed, if you but into the very general tenets of the Tea Party movement you end up with something that looks a lot like a version of libertarianism than santizes social violence and endorses abstract equality at every step, and especially in the face of actually existing material inequality. No one is against "freedom" or "liberty" until the definitions of those goods come into conflict with an individual's already existing understanding of their content--thats one nice lesson McGee gave us with the ideograph. The Tea Party is relying upon a certain notion of what it means to be an American, one it believes is unproblematically articulated all the way back to what the Founders did. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the way in which they summon American history is a way that almost any seventh grader knows to be factually inaccurate. At some point, the Tea Party will either have to rewrite American history to present something that produces the actions of the Obama administration as something illegitimate, or it will cease to succeed in writing itself a history, and conservatism will hazard down a different path.

Haunted By Hobbes and Reckoning with Rome

2010-06-08T17:48:00.001-07:00

Reading Hannah Arendt's On Revolution today, I was struck by her insight. I'd been turned on to the book by David Depew and a simple phenomenal chapter written by Andreas Kalyvas in his incredible book Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary. Arendt's book valorizes the revolutionary Americans while condemning Robespierre and his French ilk. Kalyvas follows this argument down the line to forward the notion that revolutions which maintain some sort of continuity with the existing system are less likely to end in a violent Jacobin terror.

What interests me is something Kalyvas addresses somewhat, and the rhetorical tradition as a whole seems very well suited to examining. Arendt argues that Rousseau's failing (and that of the French revolutionaries) was to decide that the major guiding principle of the revolution should be the general will: the "best interest" of "the people" (or le peuple, for those scoring at home with their constitutive rhetoric texts). Because there was no means for this idea of "the people" to be broken up, fractured, and fragmented within the French context, breaks between what "the people" wanted and what the government actually did could not be found--instead you had only a perpetual Terror, performed in the name of the people.

Here in America we have a republican tradition. That is to say, the government is understood to be elected by the people but not to always act in manners and means coterminus with "the people". I know this is a gross, gross oversimplification. Yet, I venture to make the claim that the contemporary emergence of the New Right (in the form of the Tea Partiers) is at least in part the result of a conflict between what is entailed by the discursive committment to democracy as an ideal (focusing on the "by the people" part of our hallowed refrain, and within a milieu saturated by what remains a fundamentally Hobbesian understanding of the necessity of sovereignty) and the abiding notion of Republicanism that informs the structure and institutions of this country. I'll attempt to explain and unpack this.

For Arendt, a major difference between the French tradition and the American one lies in the American committment to a notion of separation of powers.* That is to say, in the American tradition brakes on the power of the general will are built forcefully into the system. This is to be contrasted with the French notion of freedom, which Arendt finds anchored in something like a pseudo-pure Rousseauian idea of the "general will". The problem in the latter situation is well framed by this Arendtian quote: "Power under the condition of human plurality can never amount to omnipotence, and laws residing on human power can never be absolute". The problem, as you can probably see, is that humans tend to want to understand things in terms of absolutes. Ulrich Beck (and countless theorists of argumentation) have eloquently made this point elsewhere in arguments about risk assessment--humans want to deal in absolutes and certains, even when uncertainty is the name of the game.

A layered or textured understanding of democracy does not tend to resonate in the imaginary. Such matters much be simplified to make the enormous mass of a nation state reduceable/representable (think Burke here). For example, we imagine national borders in strict inside/outside logics (little room for flexible borders in the demos--just ask Arizona, and any number of democrats that successfully campaign on outsourcing). Similarly, we tend to conceive of any loss of democratic power as total and incredible, rather than temporary and partial. This is, I think, especially true when it comes to the Presidency, which seems to exercise a disproportionately powerful hold on the public imagination. We imagine the President as the center of the government, even though in many ways the Congress and Supreme Courts are just as, if not more, powerful. Chalk it up to the human need to simplify--singular human embodiment of the state is a neat and nifty tradition. Also divine right still haunts us--signifiers of authority ain't that far adrift.

In general, we need to deny that our system is Republican for another reason--one needs a Republican system because "the people" are untrustworthy. Otherwise we'd just let the general will run free, like some sort of junkyard dog of democracy. Essentially, the Constitution talks down to the American people. "We think you're pretty awesome...except when you're not." There are LOTS of mechanisms in place to make sure that the government does not equal the people--the Supreme Court, the electoral college, the non-proportional representation provided by the Senate--yet when we SAY we are a democracy, we think more of the Greeks than the Roman.

But never far from our thoughts is the lurking Hobbesian narrative about the state of nature. With total risk nearby, we need a total sovereign to secure ourselves from a life that would otherwise be "nasty, poor, brutish, and short." In the face of such danger, suspicions of republicanism are understandable, because republicanism mediates rather than constitutes the will of the people, especially if this will be for a strong sort of decisionism.

The Tea Party wants to "take the government back." The problem, of course, is that they want "the people" in charge, in a place that will forever be occupied by republican representatives of the people. The pure general will will not occupy the seat of power. But Arendt is right--the Tea Party does not seek a true revolution in her sense, just different representation. The virtue of a republican system is that it allows any faults in the government to be identified with the representatives, rather than finding members of the polis lacking in their committment to the general will, which necessitates purges. I suppose I'm rather more sanguine about what the Tea Party aims at after writing this post.

*Which, if violated, would leave us very much as we would be in the case of the use of nuclear weapons, in a situation where we wouldn't want to say "I told you so".

Tea Party as Symptom

2010-05-15T09:01:00.000-07:00

Basic, boring Foucault: language is necessary to express points of view, and indeed, its something like the condition of the possibility of points of view existing. Within our political milieu, there are certain discourses that are accessible to us and others that are not. Somewhat tautologically, those that have force or effect are those which are capable of operating differentially within what Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge a "discursive formation"--a cluster or cloud of notions, discourses, rhetorics, all of which only meaning in relation to the other. The upshot is: for a discourse to be intelligible it has to "make sense" in a particular discursive formation.

One quick historical example-in a powerful essay on the potential of civic resistance, Ken Cmiel points to the way in which members of the civil rights movement in the 1960's swung public sentiment in their direction by behaving in overwhelmingly civilized ways despite the abject violence directed at them by racist authorities and citizens. The result was a humanizing effect that enabled something like identification between the American public and these victims. To borrow from Kenneth Burke: its quite possible that these scenes transformed the African American victims of violence, previously dehumanized through rhetorical and social techniques into something fundamentally "Other", into fellow citizens by something like a "perspective by incongruity" in which the incompatability of competing frames (traditional notions of race vs. traditional civic belonging) is pointed to and eventually one is discarded in favor of the other. We might say that in this moment, African Americans became intelligible as "civic" actors--that is capable, of asserting themselves and behaving as someone who had the full understanding of what it meant to be a member of a polity was. This occurred in contradistinction to acts of violence on the behalf of police and racist authorities, which also simultaneously demonstrated that mere formal characteristics of citizenship (full access, total officialy recognition) were also not necessary OR sufficient conditions for a person being a citizen; after all, their actions had to be read as indexes of personal/individual/geographical biases rather than an entire national malaise for the frame "America" to persist undisrupted.

Why do I bring this up? In the 1960's the civil rights movement utilized the available means of persuasion within a political system to point to the ways that such a system operated with some measure of arbitrariness. Because the exposure of said arbitariness would threaten the coherence of the system as a whole, the system moved to address these concerns. The point is that the existing "discursive formation" provided the tools/mechanisms for this demand to be produced. When we turn to the Tea Party, I think we are seeing a symptom of a peculiar structural particularity: the tools available within our political system today for the Tea Partiers to produce arguments seem much less rich and ample than those provided to the social movements of the 1960's. Take one of the major arguments the Tea Partiers push on a regular basis--that the president and Congress are a bunch of socialists. Jonah Goldberg pushed this argument pretty hard in a recent Commentary piece titled "What Sort of Socialist is Barack Obama?" He and the rest of the righties aren't wrong that the government is displaying socialistic tendencies--but this is only because they broadened the meaning of the word socialism so far that it ceases to possess any meaningful utility for social critics, referring as it does to basically anything that the government might do that gets in the way of anything approaching a free market. However, rejecting something "because the government is doing it" isn't much of an answer to an awful lot of policy proposals. And it's not particularly persuasive either given that history still has a force--no matter how hard Rush Limbaugh tries we can't just forget about FDR and the New Deal.

It seems like the reductio about any governmental action turning into tyranny, fascism, etc. has been too played out. But the argument is hysterically repeated ad nauseam, in the faint hope that it will somehow make more sense. During the Cold War you at least had an existential threat to connect the fear of socialism too--the elements in the government behaving somewhat "socialist" could at least be linked to an alien force locked in cold combat with the United States. Today, however, its difficult to draw a link between Al Qaeda forces and the "socialist" elements of the Obama administration. So instead of being a socialism that successfully threatens the fiber of America (connecting healthcare policy to an enemy is easier, when you, know that enemy still exists and still seems politically viable) it instead seems like a nettlesome poke from some angry children. So I guess today I'm optimistic--it seems like the available resources in our "discursive formation" don't provide the conservatives with very many intelligible/persuasive arguments. There will need to be a shift that acknowledges that the Cold War is over, to allow for arguments to coalesce broader arguments now that the clarion call of "Terror! Freedom! Liberty!" is becoming less effective.

Another Democratic Paradox

2010-05-12T16:42:00.001-07:00

Bonnie Honig's recent book Emergency Politics points to a logical problem that has plagued political theorists since Aristotle--if democracies produce good citizens and good citizens are needed to produce democracies, then we face something of a chicken/egg conundrum--which comes first, "the people" or the people? There is an indisputable gap between the "general will" in Rousseau's sense and the elected representatives of said will, not least because if the two were completely coterminus the display of unity would obviate the initial desire to have a split between "the people" and the government because aggregated interest would be a pure and properly total index rather than a partial snapshot of what "the people" want.

One popular move of late in political theory is to grab a Schmittian matrix and decide that some form of decisionism is inevitable, if not desirable, in politics. Following this tactic most visibly in the political tradition is Chantal Mouffe, whose book The Democratic Paradox seeks to resucitate some form of decisionism from postmodern indeterminacy while simutaneously refusing to engage in the sort of fascist violence the philosophy of Carl Schmitt typically produces. The solution is to think in terms of horizons rather then borders, in terms of agonism rather than antagonism, and to produce a shared space where friends and enemies share something like a mutual, begrudging respect the projects itself in some share conditions of intelligibility between arguments.

I routinely find these inside/outside explanations of political identity formation persuasive, not least because they seem to soundly explain certain recurrent political trends. One need look no further than two presidential terms each for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, both of whom parlayed rhetorics about existential threats into political power that persisted despite political decisionmaking that was certainly questionable, if not unpopular. Moreover, as Robert Ivie has neatly formulated in his book Democracy and America's War on Terror, these distinctions operate not merely external to the physical borders of a nation but also work in the national imaginary to produce individuals who might be cititzens of the nation from a formal standpoint who nevertheless constitute enemies to "democracy" for their refusal to support the troops, the war, or acts of civic protest.

What interests me is--how is the American population protected from confronting this paradox? I will look at the example the 1960's New Left. I've been reading several pieces on this subject (if you're interested, check out the work of Ken Cmiel, Michael Kazin, Robert Cathcart, and others) and what stands out to me the way in which violence and dissent are mostly framed in political discourse as irrational outbursts of unreason that refuse to submit or kowtow to dominant political and institutional logics. This evidence can be found in our contemporary political discourse--even conservatives wholeheartedly embrace the safe and hopeful rhetorics of MLK, while liberals and conservatives alike rushed to condemn the violence of the Weather Underground as Barack Obama struggled to distance himself from sixties radical Bill Ayres.

This point has been made well by Kevin DeLuca and Jennifer Peeples--the way in which violence's appearance in public is figured is an extremely important factor in determining how "public opinion" will come down on the side of a particular movement. After all, kids in school all read MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech while being consciously pushed away from considering say, Stokely Carmichael's speech at Berkeley that attacked the silence of white privilege. Ken Cmiel, in a sharp reading of the sit ins during the civil rights movement of the sixties, points to how the tactic was effective because it performed a form of civility instantly recognizable to a moderate audience, enabling the generation of a bond of sympathy between those protesting and a broader audience--because civility is the norm, they who are the most civil will draw the most love, and sympathy.

Violence can be viewed as legitimate, of course. The vast majority of Americans view the violence used by the American government of the Union in the Civil War as legitimate because it struck out against an illegitimate human monstrosity (slavery). The violence of the Revolutionary War was scene as necessary to counter the tyranny of the British, who sought to rule and control that which they had not properly mixed enough of their labor with. But of course, those acts seem more legitimate in hindsight because they helped to produce the modern polity that we currently reside in--a United States of America produced in opposition to Britain, and rebirthed in the wake of the Civil War, cleansed of the sin of the 3/5 clause.

So long as a vocal minority is seen to be illegitimately using violence or threats thereof, a democratic population is prevented from encountering the fact that what is produced politically reflects themselves. That is, it produces a distance between the population and the unruly "people" in need of democratic regulation. Therefore, those who were part of Richard Nixon's "silent majority" in favor of a continued presence in Vietnam were given a tactic to tell themselves that they were part of a democracy (participating in the civic process of voting, casting judgment upon the violent and unruly war protestors) while also asserting that they were the "right" part of the democratic population--the part that understood what being in a polity meant in terms of personal responsibility and knowing that what it DID NOT mean was the rioting and violence thought to characterize the New Left. So in at least this case, it seems like any encounter with Honig's civic paradox is prevented. Instead of being able to apprehend that they are part of "the people" and thus in need of regulation (justifying the split between the people and the government), "the people" are projected as being the unruly protesting political masses while the "silent majority" are those people who know what it means to be civic, and also do not need to be subject to the actions that the government may take.

On the other hand, if for example you find the activities of the Weather Underground to be legitimate, you are fully embracing the problem posed by Honig's paradox--you are pointing to how "the people" are untrustworthy, and demanding an escape hatch from the circular/tautological ring of people and government who are mutually producing violence and injustice in ways that are invisible to the dyad by virtue of the non-ironic or non-distanced relationship between people and government.

Political Incoherence

2010-05-10T18:55:00.000-07:00

Been doing some remarkable reading--I strongly advise you check out Mark Lilla's recent New Yorker piece on the Tea Party movement. He has an amazing eye and ear for history, and the way in which he contextualizes the Tea Party movement as an extension of his 1998 article "A Tale of Two Reactions" is fascinating. Essentially, the argument is that the New Left of the 1960's shares with the Reagan democrats (and now, the confounding subjects of the Tea Party who want to defend their individual selves from governmental tyranny) a strong belief in the power of individuality to echo and exercise force for good.

Why this argument seems so precisely correct to me is that it explains how something like the Tea Party is capable not just of appearing in public but also maintaining its own internal coherence in the face of a rather sizeable amount of American history that contravenes a lot of the reductios circulated by the Tea Party in the name of limited government. I'm thinking particularly of the small rightist cottage industry set up around writing books about why the New Deal was bad, or the way a creeping form of originalism is beginning to do more than just legal work, rewriting the national imaginary in a way to prohibit anything like governmental involvement in social issues (ignoring momentarily the ways in which this government is supposed to intervene temporarily to return the country to how it was, in a form of regulation and intervention whose temporary acceptability is indexed by reaching into our past for a fictive shared fantasy of purity and natural greatness).

FDR was one of our greatest presidents. Nixon coopted George Wallace's voters and then enacted what amounted to progressive, liberal policy initiatives at the federal level. Dwight Eisenhower warned about the "military industrial complex". It's not all peachy keen for liberals--we're saddled with Woodrow Wilson, JFK (it seems like he was really bad, if attractive), and Clinton dispirited the former elements of the New Left as much as he pleased centrists. But as Frederic Jameson said, "history is what hurts". History, especially, must hurt the Tea Partiers, tethered as they are too a historical signifier of America's refusal to bow to something like "authority"--nevermind that what defines that authority, and one what terms, is ineffably contestable in a way that can point to the incoherence of the Tea Party's politics. Since they are for less government, and so much less of it that it would render an awful lot of our already existing political establishments, we need to account for how those arguments can appear. That, for now, can wait. But Lilla is right to point to something like a clash fostered by the contradictions of liberalism. More later.

The Tea Party and Violence

2010-05-08T14:13:00.001-07:00

In a recent dust-up between David Brooks and Jonah Goldberg, the two went the rounds over the true character of the Tea Party movement. Brooks took the position that the movement represented a radical break with the existing system, in much the same way that the student led New Left of the 1960's demanded radical social justice based on the existing system's inequality. Goldberg comes back at Brooks to make the point that what distinguishes the Tea Partiers is that the "New Left had no interest in restoring America's founding vision."

The clash, then, is between interpreting the Tea Partier's relationship to American history--Goldberg seems intent on reading for a continuity, seeing the parties emrgencies as a natural reaction to a Leftist political agenda that has taken the country away from its founding principles, while Brooks wants to interpret the group as sharing with the New Left a radical distance from on-going politics. Indeed, I hope I am not stretching to say that Brooks attempts to pull off an argument that would make Foucault proud--he points to the Rousseauian optimism at the heart of both the New Left and the Tea Parties in his view. Of course, this optimism generates different policy suggestions--the New Left wants an increased governmental role in the social so that forms of equality might be produced that let this basic human goodness flourish, while the Tea Party view wants the government out of markets especially, holding that a world unencumbered by heavy governmental regulation will produce the greatest good for the greatest number, owing to the way that market forces testify to man being "born free".

Why does this matter? Well, few political movements (and even fewer successful ones) publicly mark themselves as being against the words and principles upon which their public is founded. Witness, for example, Obama's attempt to distance himself from Jeremiah Wright's rhetoric of "God damn America!" It is bad politics to set yourself up as being against the political structures you inhabit. The Tea Partiers certainly do not do anything like this in their rhetoric, which is peppered with words like freedom, the Constitution, liberty, and of course the signifier "Tea Party" which we tend to imagine is articulated to what America stands for. However, it is a messy business to disentangle this "Tea Party" signifier from its association with revolution and violence. This is why, while I largely think Goldberg's analysis is more persuasive than Brooks's, I find myself recalcitrant in the face of the former's suggestion that the Tea Party movement proposes no break with the American tradition. After all, the Tea Party most commonly might signal for one of two things: the slogan "no taxation without representation", or the beginning of a revolution. Certainly the Tea Partiers consistently claim that they are not represented in Washington but this lack of representation is of a different character than that experienced by the colonists--it is temporary, democratically authorized, and legitimate, even if it is not experienced as such.

It requires some interpretive charity to believe that the "Tea Party" as a signifier floats around with absolutely no affective or signifying force linked to its associations with revolution have an effect on the subjects within the movement. In 1988, Gustainis and Hahns pointed to what they called a "negative reference group" problem, which posed issues for 60's era war protestors. The risk was that the more moderate elements of the group risked being linked in the public imaginary with the worst and more excessive elements of the anti-war movement, delegitimating the entire group effort. The Tea Partiers are conscious of this problem as well--a recent New Yorker article depicts participants at a rally kicking out people for bringing racist signs and being on the lookout for radicals who would promote a negative image. I am quite sincere when I say that a major motive for kicking these people out is also the participants taking offense at offensive messaging--I do believe that the Tea Partiers as a whole are well intentioned individuals (for more on this point see Jonathan Raban's piece in the New York Times Review of Books from a few months back).

Nevertheless, I cannot shake the suspicion that the historical event of the "Boston Tea Party" hints at a threat of violence. After all, we could settle on any number of different signs around which to organize our anger with the government--conservative PAC "Freedom Works" gathers constituents around the less revolutionary and depoliticized "freedom", "Americans for Prosperity" gathers folks around with a message of optimism in the market, and "The Next Right" is another conservative PAC that could produce a new political movement that insists on its continuity with the past. No, there is something in the notion of a Tea Party that makes it a vibrant rhetorical site around which to constitute a movement. It ineffably signifies not only dissatisfaction with a contemporary state of affairs, but also a willingness to promote action to change that state of affairs.

All well and good, you might say, but are not political protests a legitimate way to promote action through legitimate political channels to contest the status quo? Quite right. And we've seen a number of conservative movements that protested publicly over certain issues (abortion and gay right, for example). Those groups often united themselves with a rhetoric of defending "their way of life" or "defending their country and values" against a force externally constituted. And indeed the Tea Partiers continue this tradition, demanding often that they "take their country back." Besides some isolated incidents, however (Eric Rudolph and the Eightmaps controversy over Proposition 8 in California come to mind because of the work of my colleague Sarah Spring) these movements mostly appeared in public as movements defending a certain already American status quo (Lauren Berlant elegantly details this in her collection of essays The Queen of America Goes to Washington City). Because social space was already configured with a presumption or hegemony in favor of the conservative arguments, there was little need to associate the movement with revolutionary imagery (and the privilege of being an unmarked public plays into this as well). So for me, the move to the Tea Party as a signifier of conservative discontent represents not just continuity with America's past, but also a tacit acknowledgment that when things get bad, resistance and recalcitrance are legitimate. Why else move to this imagery that secures the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in a polity that spent much of the 20th century using rhetorical strategies to delegitimze violent resistance and depoliticize political space itself? Words like "freedom" and "liberty" do not quite do enough work right now for conservatives, because while everyone is for them, they are fundamentally hegemonic terms whose possible rearticulation is made concretely threatening to conservative privilege through the electoral victory of Barack Obama. Subjects need a vocabulary to disagree not just with the content of the President's policies but also a means of symbolic compensation to assert that no matter how much the government does not represent their views, they will always have some kind of voice, even if it is a violent one.

Why the Tea Party Is and Is Not Overblown

2010-04-24T20:55:00.000-07:00

(I'm trying my hand at blogging about the academic subjects I tend to be writing about--I think it should be fun)

The Tea Party movement has obtained a lot of visibility of late. A slick article at Politico made the point that the movement's impact has been overstated, both in terms of the "actual" people that subscribe to it, and in the incentive that mass media has to fixate on the Tea Party as a shiny object to promote easy partisan deliberation (The Left mocks, the Right defends). I'm interested in how the Politico piece minimizes the impact of the Tea Party by turning it into something that is "merely" a media production, in much the same way that enemies of rhetoric turn an important piece of argumentation into "mere rhetoric", a weak adorning feature of an externally constituted reality.

The difficulty, of course, is in figuring out just how many people identify with the Tea Party movement, and, just as tellingly, how many people violently react against identifying with it. One might say that the only fair measure of the Tea Party's impact will be to wait and see for the result of the midterm elections in November. Perhaps. My suspicion, though, is that even if we want to temporarily eschew traditional measures of the "importance" of the movement (polling, electoral results), we can still speculate about what the appearance in public of the movement really signals. That is to say, the fact that its a topic of conversation throughout the cable news world and over the Interwebs means that examining how discourse about the Tea Party circulates might provide us with a helpful index for what individuals think the character of America is "like" at this particular moment.

Take Politico's argument that both the left and right have good reason for sitting on the movement--the Left, to point to the foolishness of their opposition and solidify their own identity as the organized population in power (and no doubt committed to a form of "rational" debate to which the Tea Party movement is wholly alien in left eyes) and the Right in order to constitute something like an image of "the people" useful for producing the political position of a legitimately aggrieved population to argue against the Democrats in power. In this case the argument embedded within the Politico piece undermines the piece's own conclusion, that the impact of the movement is overblown. Why? Because the movement's framing in the media, and the reactions to it by political actors gives us insight into how current social space is constituted during a midterm election year.

Consider, for example, that the right's arguments valorizing the Tea Partiers will easily serve as the same topoi the conservatives will use in the upcoming election. For example, the Tea Partiers are often positioned as "revolutionaries" who "want to take their country back". A recent ad campaign underscores this point. Found here (h/t to TPM), the ad uses a provocative metaphor, implying that Barack Obama is an illegitimate fascist leader, the product of a cult of personality who is destroying American values. Utilizing imagery and symbols found throughout the film V for Vendetta (and presumably the comic as well), the film seems to imply this November will contain a revolution of sorts. This campaign comes from Haley Barbour's people, an important young moving and shaking element in the Republican party.

So on one hand Politico can say: the Tea Party movement doesn't really matter. On the other hand, the GOP is producing advertisements that indicate they believe the sort of people who might identify with the Tea Party movement are also an important target population for the 2010 midterm. So the GOP is behaving "as if" the Tea Partiers do matter as a political consituency. The GOP has had success drumming up fears, and it seems will continue to do so.

The leftist mockery is also valuable for study. For example, The Daily Show has done a good job of pointing to the lack of demographic diversity attached to the movement. This post, circulated throughout the Facebook, has also really resonated with people, pointing to how the movement's embrace of tacit threats of violence has continued to be present, avoiding the sort of criticism that might be levelled at a more diverse crowd making similar claims. Obviously, the Democrats want to claim that the Tea Partiers don't represent a proper cross-section of the American population.

I don't really have any conclusions here, just wanted to jot some thoughts down.

Statement

2010-04-20T20:55:00.000-07:00

"We are all at the mercy of what makes us happiest"

I was told to stake my proprietary ownership to this statement.

Worst. Meme Theft. Ever.

2009-03-05T13:59:00.001-08:00

From a press release, attacking Obama for threatening America's gun rights:

"We warned America that Obama's 'support' for the Second Amendment was empty rhetoric," he stated, "and now Holder's disclosure has confirmed it. Obama was lying, and now gun rights may be dying."

In Response to the Following Post, the Answer is:

2009-02-20T15:21:00.001-08:00

Nope.

Is Performativity the Feminine Not-All?

2009-02-19T11:05:00.000-08:00

This is the question I have come to while thinking about a historicized critique of the phallus in work which uses Lacan. Initially, I was hoping to make a Butlerian critique of the concept, styled like what we debate folks would call a "language PIC", as Isaac West and Regnier properly identified the project.

This seems to have fallen by the wayside as I place more and more scrutiny on the clash between Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity and Joan Copjec's logic of the feminine not-all. Essentially, to be able to run the critique of the phallus, I would have to make use of the diachronically existing reserves that could render the phallus sensible as the very object I would critique of standing in for--the penis. After all, the goal of the critique would be to say "if you don't gain anything from calling it a phallus, why do that?". You could simply instead make reference to the point of impossibility that makes subjectivity possible--wholeness is not had so that partiality can be, and that partiality exists in relation to totality to explain why subjects move towards a perceived wholeness, although that is a fiction.

At any rate, after pushing Jason Regnier and Meryl on this question, and rereading Joan Copjec's chapter "Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason" in Read My Desire, I struggle to believe that I can make this historicized argument without repudiating Copjec's account of feminine sexuality. In order to conclude that there is something objectionable about the term phallus, I have to confer upon the term a certain historicized meaning which implicates me in already understanding sexual difference in a recognizable way, and particularly, as somehow reconstructing a binary of some sort which makes phallus recognizable as a term that has a gendered effect.

Ergo, I am thinking instead of pursuing the following question: is performativity for Butler the same thing as sexual difference in Copjec? After all, Butler's argument is simply that the always evident and prevalent performances of gender demonstrate that there is no such natural thing as woman or man, gay or lesbian, trans or straight. Each performance is evidence that there is no totality to which gender terms actually point. Similarly, Copjec's argument is that the feminine is evidence of the not-all of being, that totality is itself impossible- the difference between the masculine and the feminine is that the masculine claims to be complete. I think one could argue that this is consistent with Butler's position. The feminine, which is positively valenced for Copjec, is good because it provides a space of contingency outside of signification, crucial as an escape hatch to the discursive prison of say Foucault. This is why Copjec is running a critique of Butler--the feminine provides a hope for something beyond the mere existence of discursive survival. But I think one can read Butler as more than a mere survivalist- that gender performances which attempt "passing" are negatively valenced for Butler, who points to examples of what happens when someone "can not pass" as evidence of their failing to live up to some totality to which they are articulated. In the sort of best possible world for Butler, gender performances have denaturalized essences to the point that the recognition of difference is impossible. Crucially important to this argument is that we may not be where difference is meaningless; instead, difference is all there is, a series of performances that exist as singularities, not particularities articulated to a totality.

Random Deleuze Line of the Day

2009-02-03T20:02:00.000-08:00

We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.

p. 67, A Thousand Plateaus

Chapter Two of Society Must be Defended

2009-02-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

I just think this is a good quote:

"Third, methodological precaution: Do not regard power as a phenomenon of mass and homogeneous domination--the domination of one individual over others, of one group over others, or of one class over others; keep it clearly in mind that unless we are looking at it from a great height and from a very great distance, power is not something that is divided between those who have it and hold it exclusively, and those who do not have it and are subject to it. Power must, I think, be analyzed as something that circulates, or rather as something that functions only when it is part of a chain It is never localized here or there, it is never in the hands of some, and it is never appropriated in the way that wealth of a commodity can be appropriated. Power functions. Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power passes through individuals. It is not applied to them." (29)

Thus Foucault urges us not to conceive of the individual as some autonomous atomized figure, but to instead discuss this individual as an effect of power, constituted by and it and simultaneously the vessel for its exercise. The position of a "great height" from which one could conceivably see power is presumably fictive (Indeed, this links up most directly with the Deleuze and Guattari I've been reading lately, in which seeing networks of power would be possible only from a peak or mountain that thought itself capable of looking down on a plateau).

On Deleuze and Guattari

2009-01-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

Read the first 25 or so pages of A Thousand Plateaus. At first I was skeptical, and frightened. After all, these fellas were just going on and on about rhizomes, tubers, couch grass, crab grass, Little Richard, and who knows what else.

But after the shock of their style had worn off on me, I found myself attracted, even entranced by their writing style. Moreover, as I have been in pitched battle with Foucault for the last couple of months, it was interesting to read the folks who embrace particularism to an extent only imagined in a text like Discipline and Punish. My major question as I read the intro was just one of orientation and alternative. It would, of course, be fabulous if everyone embraced this hyper-articulation that evaded and dodged all reference to structure in any determining way, but I struggle to understand the utility of such an approach in a world where structures, state apparatuses, and signifiers all "do not float far enough".

As we continue in this Deleuze reading group, I eagerly anticipate A) ferreting out their critique of psychoanalysis, B) understanding what practical implications their recommendations may have and C) figuring out if we can ever know that we are on a plateau.

A New Feature

2009-01-25T22:06:00.001-08:00

New feature: Random Deleuze Line of the Day!!

Because I am in a reading group for some Deleuze, I will occasionally post insane quotes found in the course of reading.

today's sample is from a thousand plateaus, p. 9:

"You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed"

Part Two of the HOS: The Repressive Hypothesis

2009-01-25T09:09:00.000-08:00

In the past "one did not speak of sex" and this effect was produced through a prudish series of mutually referential prohibitions. Or at least, this is the conventional account of things according to Foucault. For him it seems the real key is that speaking of sex became somehow a novel and transgressively valenced move. To whisper in the corners about sex could be taken as a form of noble resistance, or at least something which disclosed a particular character of the soul: "Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings: beneath the surfance of the sins, it would lay bare the unbroken nervure of the flesh" (20). I really like his prose here--confession is a spelling out of the excess of desire, but very rarely turns into a discussion of the spilling out of this excess on bodily acts.

Endless and extensive discourses manufacturing of "the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex." (20). One can see the workings of the argument here--as a greater and greater number of acts and thoughts became linked to "sex" and this linkage was performed in language, it becomes possible to think of sex as a thing, and not think of each discrete and variable act or thought as something unto itself.

The concern with discussing sex moved into the public under the guise of population discussion Monitoring birth rates, death rates, marital statuses etc. were objects of interest, and as a result sex could be directly articulated to the national interest of a population. Because I am reading this for a Queer Rhetorics class, it seems silly for me to not note that this provides one explanation for homophobia in its early forms- "perverse" sex not aimed at procreation was a direct threat to the health of the nation, because it would not be sex that would increase the size of the population, and thus not make the "body politic" stronger. Certainly this is not limited to what we would call "same-sex" acts: the interesting kernel at the heart of these prohibitions is that way in which it also delimits opportunities for physical activity in the marital bedroom in relation to acts intended for procreation.

I also want to quote at length from Foucault on silence:

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them in relation to them within over-all strategies. There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case. There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses. " (27)

Central to understanding this passage is importing Foucault's notion of power as productive, not destructive, as outlined in Discipline and Punish. One would mix this critique thoroughly with his criticism of the repressive hypothesis. Traditional notion of silence: it is demanding and waiting to be filled with something, with something that has been neutralized and driven out of its proper space. Critique of this notion: it assumes that there is something which belongs in that natural space, and moreover, assumes some uniform "thing" existed to be driven from that space, as opposed to opening up to the possibility that that very "thing" was created via discourse. "Visibility is a trap" says the Foucault of the prisoners, and here that is clear: sex, made into an object which circulates and both enforces itself and is enforced upon, is controlled owing to the very visibility of it as a sensible notion.

There is another curious moment, where Foucault posits a structural answer to the "Why" question: that sex is an object of manipulation to serve economic and conservative social interests? He says he does not know, but he does know that if this is the case, production, not repression, is the means.

"Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse." (47). "Aberrant" sexual behaviors are not the result of the failed universalization of a program of Puritan regulation, nor from the repression and reemergence of drives and desires. Rather, the behaviors are produced from the discursive regulation and constitution of a notion of "sex". They are products of "the encroachment of a type of power on bodies and their pleasures" (48). They are not "results" but rather, they just are.

Once More Into the HOS Vol. 1 Breach, Dear Friends!

2009-01-23T09:32:00.000-08:00

We're reading this for my queer rhetorics class. I'm going to post various and sundry meandering thoughts about this text as I read it today.

Part One: We "Other Victorians"

Text begins with section dedicated to outlining a taken for granted understanding of sexuality as a thing which has been represeed by modern developments. An understanding of sexuality as an object of manipulation and operation, and prohibition is contrasted with repression. Prohibition serves to stop actions from taking place, while repression indicates that there are a series of charges and obsessions which are simply redirected. And about this Foucault asks:

"Could things have been otherwise? We are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure with reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. For the least glimmer of truth is conditioned by politics. Hence, one cannot hope to obtain the desired results simply from a medical practice, nor from a theoretical discourse, however rigorously pursued" (5).

This to me reads as a mortar lobbed at those reading the fallout of a post-68 politics as a call to arms for a more universal and powerful rebellion against instituted powers. The result of a repressive thesis is an understanding of the source of repression must have been appropriately strong to suppress something inimical about human being, and, moreover, that the proper solution is to enable conditions for this human spirit of some sort to rise up in all its glory and power.

And this repressive hypothesis has the effect of turning an ordinary and everyday behavior into something transgressive--if power has operated by repressing sexuality, merely talking about sexuality is enough to constitute a trangression of sorts. Thus all the criticism of psychoanalysis--a means of "transgressively" disclosing the secrets that speak a deep and infinite validation of the existence of some notion of sexuality within, repressed and quashed by a nasty apparatus. This hushed speaking of sex hints at a future utopia wherein "liberation and manifold pleasures" will be free for all. What seems important throughout is that sexuality is a sort of object which much be liberated from the chains in which it is embedded. As this is the sedimented common sense of the matter, Foucault argues, his whole book might read as somewhat mad.

Foucault is out to trace the history of how we have come to believe in this repression. Why has sex been made into a sin? And what of repression, if its explanatory power is of such magnitude that it becomes an all encompassing tautology we are incapable of opposing on the basis of fact and argument?

Thus three meta doubts about repression: Is this repression a historically established fact? Is power always repressive, or at least primarily repressive? And finally, is critical analysis of repression itself a break or a continuation of the set of power relations that enabled repression's supposed effects to continue to reproduce themselves? And by connection, Foucault plans to investigate the ways in which sex comes to be an object which is said to have forces exerted upon it, even as it as a notion colonizes the individual in an internalized and controlling fashion, mutually constituting itself through a series of discourses and practices marked and mapped by discourse.

He is not out to say that the history of prohibition does not contain truths--rather, we should not take that one story as the only and proper one, for granted. Historical facts will be used to reduce the monolithic force of the repressive hypothesis.

More later.

Foucault on the "Eye of Power" in the Power/Knowledge Reader

2009-01-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

I've been reading DeCerteau with great interest, and its easy to see how much of his work on tactics/strategy is drawn directly from Foucault, while building on what Foucault has to say. In this short excerpt from the interviews, Foucault further expands upon what he thinks of Bentham's panopticon, using the notion as a metaphor to launch a few well placed lobs against those who would be obsessed with class struggle:

"Struggle is the word used most often...are to be analyzed as episodes in a war?...the affirmation of a struggle can't be the beginning and end of all explanations in the analysis of power relations"

The point here seems to be that a struggle presumes two already fixed or monolithic forces already existing around which and through which resistances are organized and play. So when Foucault says the "good old logic of contradiction is no longer sufficient" to unravel actual processes, the argument seems to be that juxtaposition and division on the basis of separation helps to constitute existing social processes and structures, not bring them into a levelling light that exposes their "true character". In searching for the "right" struggle and alignment, analysis which presumes that there is a struggle in the first place is a lens which means one focuses on the supposed structures involved in the struggle and not their formulation.

Football Proves

2008-12-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

that socialism doesn't actually hold down the best and the brightest. Despite a salary cap (which has the effect of leveling the starting point of most NFL teams), the truly talented workers within the system are able to demonstrate their competence (Belichik, Parcells), while the incompetents (Millen, Savage) still fail.

Tropological Presidents

2008-12-29T21:58:00.001-08:00

Reagan was a properly synecdochal president while Bush II was a metonymic one. The evidence is in the electoral returns and the subsequent treatment. Following Diane Rubenstein, Reagan was a perfect master signifier because he was total nothingness that nevertheless was able to signify Americaness owing to his election. Ergo Reagan was beloved because he could properly demonstrate the hollowness of the presidency without revealing its hollowness.

I'm moving fast but: assume phallic function=master signifier. "For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the instrasubjective economy of analysis, may lift the veil from the function it served in the mysteries. For it is the signifier that is destined to designate meaning effects as a whole, insofar as the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier"

Reading back to the essay on "Logical Time": The master signifier is the master signifier by its virtue of having been chosen, much as the move towards the door is predetermined by the prisoners in a moment which exists outside of time yet nevertheless gives rise to the logics that can have explained retroactively the why of what occurred.

thus the President is the President by virtue of his/her having been selected as such, and his/her status must have an explanation. Taking Chad's point advisedly, that the "Time" essay is really about the moment in which the Ego is thrust into the symbolic and how the Ego has an account of its occurrence despite the fact that it seems outside of spatial reasoning, we can apply this reasoning to the election of 2000. With Bush II as the president, an account is needed to account for why he is the President in order to explain the anti-democratic (and republican, hat tip to MKF) peculiarity that explains his rise.

If the Presidency designates meaning effects as a whole, then it will have to look as though the President was legitimately in that position in the first place- hence the strong electoral victory in 2004.

The Dark Knight

2008-12-26T09:46:00.000-08:00

What a complex film, lending itself to any number of readings. Today I present: lame, read it like the WOT and America's post 9/11 security strategy!!! (And of course, spoilers. But who hasn't seen this?)

The Joker is explicitly referred to as a terrorist throughout the film. I'm gonna go ahead and not pull a "mega depth hermeneutic", and agree with that one. We'll go ahead and slot Harvey Dent in as American idealism/Truth, Justice, and the American Way/all the good stuff the Founders stood for. Lt. Gordon, the mayor, associated judges and beauracrats all seem to be part of the state apparatus that stands as the material instantiation of the ideals Dent stands for: which is to say, a compromised version. You can't properly call Batman a state apparatus (although he works closely with the police) because he exists by virtue of his separation from the official enforcers of law and order.

When the film opens, the criminals are, by and large, on the run. Dent, Batman, and Gordon's cops are slowly but surely closing a net on the Gotham criminal's monetary fund. The civic spirit is so alive ordinary citizens feel empowered to dress up like Batman and go after criminals. Two blots remain- corruption within the police department that allows the mobster to be tipped off when the police are about to move, and the Joker, who early in the film seems more interested in terrorizing/robbing the mob.

The film makes the argument that without the Joker, criminals in Gotham would eventually be put "in the cooler" by the combined forces of Dent, Gordon, and "the Batman". Dent's refusal to cower in the face of threats of physical coercion (he stands up to the crook who pulls a gun on him), Gordon's good old American gumption, and Batman's combination of swift power and high technology all give rise to scenes of worried mobsters gathered to seek council. The Chinese businessman who temporarily saves their money from impoundment is still extradited via Bat-chute, and we are led to believe that he will squeal. Because Batman and Dent seem above corruption (both are avatars of justice), the film's running time would be very short if the Joker did not appear.

"Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stranger" and "Why so serious?" are the most haunting early verbal markers of the Joker's true nature. Throughout the Joker tells a series of different "origin stories" about his bizarre face. The effect is decidedly postmodern, making attempts to read a traditional set of character motivations onto him difficult. There are, I think, two clear explanations for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the attacks of September 11th which circulate popularly. You have the argument that wahhabism is the result of an ideological religion built on expansion that is committed to enforcing its big T truths by hook or by crook, and thus resentment against the West is the result of a disagreement and an ethical condemnation of a group of people refusing to live by the correct values, who must be appropriately converted or killed. The other explanation, popular among Ivan Eland and others, is that the form of violent Islamic fundamentalism seen among Osama bin Laden and others is the result of deep seated resentment generated by a combination of American military occupation of the Middle East, support for Israel, and the creeping effects of globalization in eroding culture.

Was the Joker cut by his father with a blade? Was his wife really frowning too much? The reader of the film that debates which of these stories is true is probably missing the point. Any one of these explanations could be true. What matters less is which is, and more what the Joker is actually doing, in the moment. The history of the doer is irrelevant- it is the deed itself that matters. The entire opening bank robbery scene is dedicated to enforcing this point. "The Joker" is constantly referred to as the planner, mastermind, and puppeteer of the entire operation. Yet the importance of the act is not what is says about the Joker, but that someone has refused to give into the fear and coercion offered by the mob. As a figure the Joker stands outside the interpellation offered by both the police (legal force does not deter him) and the mob (threats of violence motivate and excite him).

The Joker's history is besides the point. Wondering about or trying to explain his origins seems useless, even counterproductive. His acts, however, mark the points at which systems of logic/rationality seem to have exhausted themselves. The opening bank robbery succeeds because of the way in which the Joker ruthlessly plots the elimination of each of his fellow robbers; if violence governs, then we will have no honor among thieves. His murder of the Batman imposter points to the curiosity of the tolerance the system of law and order has for "the Batman": the Joker's act can be read as nothing more than another act of vigilante justice against a law breaker, no more illegitimate as Batman's, one which takes seriously the proclamation of identity. Because these Batman imposters have been given strength through the visible campaign of Batman and the police to clean up Gotham, their murder at the hands of the Joker is in some sense their "just dessert" for embracing a figure who simultaneously advances law and order while working outside of it.

Throughout the film the Joker is always one step ahead with his plots, evidencing a powerful sense of sophistication and knowledge. He knows to lie about the positions of Dawes and Dent when they are kidnapped so Batman will save the wrong one. He plots to get himself captured, setting up escape mechanisms well in advance. He knows enough about police tactics that he sets up the trap with the hostages in the uncompleted Trump Tower. He knows that citizens will be able to escape from Gotham only by boat, so he rigs them up with his "rational choice paradigm" trap. The Joker, is , frankly, too powerful to be any "real" figure. Thus the image of terrorism authored by the film is one of an all powerful, nearly omnipotent, and always already everywhere disturbance. Terrorism is always one step ahead. And powerful enough to kill Dawes, corrupt Dent, and drive the Batman to violate his own codes against violence and rights violations.

Nowhere is all of this evidenced more clearly in the conversation in the hospital between the Joker and Dent (now Two-Face). The Joker is able to pervert Dent's sense of goodness and justice so that he becomes a figure of vengeance, motivated by delivering punishment outside the confines of the law. As mobsters and corrupt cops are killed, we see the flipside of truth, justice, and the American way: the overarching sense of good and right that underlies the spirit of justice can ultimately corrupt its enforcement. One reason why this troubles me is because the film does not do a good job of portraying the victims of this violence compassionately. Essentially, they are all bad people who get what they deserve, except for Officer Ramirez, who was pressured into corruption to pay her mother's hospital bills. She is spared. External circumstances may influence justice. That is why Dent does not kill her after his coin saves her, but he does still kill the mobster when the coin bails him out.

Thus the necessity for Batman and Gordon to cover up Dent's violent crimes. It is evidence that the ideal of justice is purely ideal, not material. Even Dent was corruptible. So he must exist as a martyr in the eyes of the public ("we should all strive to be as noble as Dent"), even as the material reality of his existence contravenes the possibility of the ideal existing ("even Dent was not above it"). The victory at the end of the film is not in redeeming justice- it is in preserving it as a fiction to be consumed by the people of Gotham so that they may go on living their lives with hope. Necessary, perhaps, but also enabled through a governmental cover up which fingers Batman as the killer, turning him into an enemy of the establishment. Essentially: "the real enemy is the ideal of justice and stability, which gave birth to the Joker as its necessary correspondent. But because we cannot face up to the fact that it is these ideals which are the problem, lets just blame this law breaking guy in a costume who just HAPPENS to follow the spirit of the law, if not the letter". We cannot have justice with a figure committing injustice to make the concept sensible. I would do a Foucault riff here, but I think the shorthand does the trick.

And Batman himself is only able to capture the Joker by generating a "state of exception". Early in the film, at a dinner scene between Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, Dent argues for the old temporary suspension of civic rule, in which all powers are given to a sovereign to protect the people. Dawes points out that this was an epic fail (Caeser). Yet later in the film this very logic is perserved and endorsed. After building his massive NSA style surveillance operation, Wayne convinces Lucious Fox to use it just this once to track down the Joker. If they had not used the NSA apparatus, the Joker would have eventually killed the people on the boats (making irrelevant their humanity empowering decisions not to kill), and the SWAT teams would have killed the hostages dressed as crooks, creating a massive publicity crisis for the state apparatus embodied in the police. Instead the NSA device allows all of this to be averted. And the film encourages the viewer to support the fiction that such devices are "only used once". Conveniently, Batman's self-destructs. However, the security architecture enacted in the wake of 9/11 cannot simply be wished away or destroyed. In fact, its entire existence is premised on the idea that it only exists in one moment. Yet this one moment is constituted as a perpetual state of insecurity and unrest, meaning the state of exception is perpetuated. The film says "Don't sweat it, they really only use this stuff if they really have to", but the message of the rest of the film, owing to the Joker's omnipotence and Dent's corruptibility is "They always really have to!!".

Now one might say: but that tower and the hostages were only distraction from the real threat to Law and Order, the very public murders committed by Dent (including the possibility of his murder of Gordon's family). However the hostage crisis was a direct result of poor crisis management by the authorities, so the deaths of the hostages would have also been a devastating event.

Oddly, I think the film sort of makes a rather pragmatic conclusion about terrorism and security. These threats exist, but as a result of the systemic way in which systems of truth and rationality manufacture necessary disorders in their attempts to completely create order, and that the only way to handle them is through effective and canny use of a combination of repressive state apparati and mythology, in the form of Dent. Perhaps the film is just saying "this is how we must do this", but that in and of itself is still normative, and has the effect of closing off possibilities of thinking and doing otherwise.

Close Reading: Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty

2008-12-22T12:32:00.000-08:00

On the advice of David Wittenberg, I read this essay, subtitled "A New Sophism".....

Lacan begins his story with a logical puzzle of sorts: three prisoners have had colored dots fastened to themselves, out of their direct line of sight, so they they may only infer what color their dot is from the dots of the other prisoners. In the example, the prison warden only uses white dots, not making any use of the black ones.

The perfect solution, Lacan outlines is one in which all three of the prisoners walk through the door at the same time:

"I am a white, and here is how I know it. Since my companions were whites, I thought that, had I been a black, each of them would have been able to infer the following: "If I too were a black, the other would have necessarily realized stragiht away that he was a white and he would have left immediately; therefore I am not a black. And both would have left together, convinced they were whites. As they did nothing of the kind, I must be a white like them."

Lacan offers this solution as a sort of sophistic provocation He defines sophism as "a significant example for the resolution of the forms of a logical function at the historical moment at which the problems these forms raise presents itself to philosophical examnation". I will attempt to break this down.

"For the resolution of the forms of a logical function". So the problem itself is viewed as a sort of object on which perform logical operations? It is a palette on which we can paint with dialectic. That doesn't really sound like exactly what I mean, because he seems to intimate that applying logic has a certain sort of constraining effect (his consistent swipes at Sartre standing), and painting seems less limited (but it also is, by the size of the palette, the available colors, the sorts of paints and brushes one has). Upshot: the problem is an object to perform a proof upon.

"at the historical moment at the problems these forms raise presents itself to philosophical examination". Well, thats a mouthful. Sophistry of course carries all sorts of negative connotations, recent attempts to save them (ie Poulakos) nonwithstanding. I feel most comfortable forwarding the following generic notion of what "sophistry" tends to be thought of- distracting from the proper with reference to verbal/rhetorical guile and cunning. This at least seems to be the most common pejorative lobbed at the sophists.

So the problem itself is a space for problems embedded within logic itself to come out, to demand their own interrogation. A sort of new form of Zeno's Paradox, perhaps. Zeno's trickery about space served to make the point that one could not actually get anywhere else if they moved in halves. Of course folks could still make it from point x to point y, but the upshot seems to be that sophistry deceives or alters reality, or at least its perception.

The sophism, we should remember, is the solution itself. We should question its "neat cuteness", as a sort of rom com of logic. We will determine its sophistry if its presents itself "as a logical error" (163).

Lacan wants to unseat the clever solution to the problem by acting as "the good logician, odious to the world". He wants to nuke and fracture this particular "meet cute" of problem and solution. His "discussion of the Sophism". He draws out a "hestitation problem", one that the sophistic solution finds difficult. The immediate movement of all three figures towards the door would probably cause them to hesitate, and second guess the motivations of their fellow prisoners.

Essentially the problem is as follows: how does a subject conclude anything when everything is learned/apprehended at the same moment? The answer seems to be something along the lines of: the moment of judging and the moment of acting are inseparable. I will try and clarify this insight.

If the subject may only take into account real behavior, and the subjects all act according to what they observe, then all subjects move at precisely the same moment, eliding the possible moment in time in which one subject could obtain from the actions of others information about their own status as white beaded or black beaded. (Again, Lacan's reference to Sophism is really interesting here- it made me think again of Xeno's paradox, and how the use of rhetorical trickeration in that case made it seem possible that a subject might never be able to reach a destination. Similarly, here we find that a number of destinations are foreclosed a priori by the spatialization of time).

So actions only occur concurrently, owing to the fact that the anticipation of a future anterior blackness/whiteness has encouraged the subjects to act/judge in a particular way in a moment. The moment of contemplation about all of this is present in the logical discussion but seems somewhat fictive- what is important is that in acting in the moment, each subject has made it so they believe themselves to be white beaded. The suspended motions necessary to make the logical outcome of whiteness so never actually occur. But it is the figuration of their possibility that makes the subjects behave in ways so that they believe themselves to be a particular color.

The moment of contemplation of actions and of observing the actions of the other prisoners does not exist temporally, only spatially. Logic, Lacan encourages us, is not to be thought spatially. Logic is capable of finding things within its own terms, quite capably (this is analagous to the first position found in Lacan's Seminar on Poe's Purloined Letter). Logic is able to find its answers, however, by neturalizing and denying its own status as another position in a realm of coordinates. The logical viewpoint is the one from which other subjects and actions and thoughts may be viewed. Thus a spatialized logic is no logic at all, in a sense.

Thinking spatially CANNOT explain why the suspended motions do not occur. It provides only a rather uninteresting answer to the asked question- are the prisoners white, or black? The intial objection (that the subjects will doubt owing to the behavior of others), only makes sense if we conceive of this problem in the essay spatially. The suspended motion would be thought to be information disclosing, that is, revealing something about a world of subjects out there and their views about the world.

It is, however, in this essay that Lacan does some work to point the way for the theory of the "as if" that has become increasingly important, discussing "times of possibility". As a rhetorician, I was immediately drawn to the kairotic possibilities here. The subjects, in behaving "as if" the logic outlined by Lacan was operative, have essentially made themselves into the color predestined by the future anterior which excludes "so there will not be" a subject left behind, without proper knowledge of their color. As Lacan draws explicit parallells in this essay to his essay on the Mirror Stage, I do not feel too far gone in noting that a subject who "does not know his color" so to speak, yet is situated collectively by a drive to "outdo" the other is the paradigmatic case of subjectivity (and Lacan says as much here).

After all, to have an "if...then" statement, the if must proceed the then. But if the if proceeds the then, there must be a moment of time in between the if and then. However Lacan seems to be raising a major problem with this mode of thinking: What if the "if...then" proposition makes itself operative by appearing to be confirmed by behaviors that fall in line within the proposition yet not interrogating the conditions for the possibility of "if...then" to be operative. More concretely, it is misleading to explain the way the prisoners come to their conclusions in the way when it seems to be the case that the prisoners came to this conclusion not through a process of logical testing, but rather making the situation through their judgment of their own status via the act of advancing toward the door. Right or wrong about their own status, they proceed, with the future anterior here posited as that of the situation of not properly knowing ones status- the idea being that gathering information is a sort of zero-sum game, and one is better off making a certainty than being subjected to anothers certainty. This possibility is allowed by lacan, when he argues that a subject who paused after the other two moved would have simply subjected themselves to the world made by the other two subjects.

Embedded within the decision to move towards the door is a conclusion and thus an act of judgment about ones status, much as the act of becoming a subject is itself a decision which guarantees the reaffirmation of the simultaneous fiction and possibility of being a whole subject measured against the Other. The possibility for truth lies in the existence of others, who may confirm or deny, giving rise to rightness and error, each of which is already predestined. Entering into the symbolic is an already chosen departure towards a door with a conclusion in hand about one's "color", and it occurs regardless of what one's "actual color" is.

I might write more on this essay but man, its rugged. Anyone with an angle on spatialization vs. temporalization in this thing, I am all ears.

Essay on the Mirror Stage- A Reading

2008-12-20T00:23:00.001-08:00

A Disclaimer:

One thing I will do a lot on this blog is to do close readings of essays or book sections. I do not anticipate ANY of this readings will prove authoritative, or even good. One thing that I am continually reminded of is that this academic business is very, very hard work, and so a lot of what I post here I hope I a sort of first draft of a thought. A major reason I have decided to blog is because of the “iceberg theorem” that I think governs academic writing. As in the case of the iceberg, whose heft is generally hidden under the sea, so too do good essays have beneath them months and months of difficult, hard work found in close reading and developing ideas. These ideas may not explicitly show up in the essay and yet do so much work for the writer that they seem to me to be invaluable.

So to contextualize this reading a little bit: I have turned to this essay of Lacan’s in the process of developing further an essay I wrote on Vladimir Putin in the spring semester last year. I need to understand better the functions of the Ideal/Ego and Ego/Ideal so I can more competently reflect on the relationship between Time magazine’s Person of the Year feature and the national consciousness.

Lacan begins by examining the ego, and states outright that “this experience sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.” So, “I think, therefore I am” is to be problematized. Mimesis is here privileged as the primary mover in the development of subjectivity. Lacan’s exemplary child recognizes his own image owing to the ability to manipulate it in the mirror, where he “playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment” (75).

Lacan is after insights about an “ontological structure” of the human world. This is a question of Being, not a question of knowledge. The mirror stage kickstarts an imaginary identification. The dependent infant, seeing a specular image is “manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordrial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as a subject” (76). This is the Ideal-Ego, which remains fictional and “will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming”. I understand this image to be the ideal to which the subject will always move itself to become a fully formed subject. It is purely an ideal—a necessary fiction. We might think of this image as an always receding horizon—the subject seeks constantly to reach this horizon, to fill out this empty profile, yet is prohibited from doing so.

More fascinating still are the passages on 78, where Lacan speaks of the internal pressure of the mirror stage and how the subject is pushed from insufficiency to anticipation. If all the subject experienced was insufficiency, subjectivity’s drive towards completion might stop out of despair. If all the subject experienced was a pleasurable anticipation, movement would also stop—the subject would wish to sustain in that very moment. Lacan calls the resulting development “orthopedic”. Doing some etymological work, the result is “the straight rearing of children” as the definition of the two roots that play into orthopedics. Here we can read the “straight” part to mean properly or orderly—the fragmented body of the child is made whole/orderly by the fictive projection of a complete image. Thus the fictive whole is adopted as a goal towards which a subject is always moving and straining, and believing in the achievement of this totality enables subjectivity.

All this business about the fragmented body I find fascinating, in light of all I have read lately about partial objects, fractured drives, and the multiple different ways of centering pleasure around various body parts. And of course here Lacan seems clearly to be making the “not-all of being” argument that Joan Copjec so aggressively makes in Imagine There’s No Woman.

So when does “the specular I turn into the social I? It is when the mirror stages ends, and the previously imagined image of I becomes “linked to socially elaborated situations” (79). Lacan says this is the point where “the whole of human knowledge mediated by the others desire”. The self image of “I” becomes threatened. The self defines the self against the other to ensure that the self remains independent—throughout the essay Lacan speaks of “armor” and “defenses”, indicating that the projection of the ego into the social is an identity risking enterprise, one that helps to ensure that the sense of the self is strengthened, even as the desire for the desire of the Other is strengthened.

The ego is about misrecoginition. The ego cannot be about recognition, because if this is the case, Lacan argues, the result of the consciousness of the Other is “Hegelian murder”—the inevitable conquest involved in the Master-Slave dialectic. Self-realization obtained only in suicide—the annihilation of the self is taken as the only evidence that the self could ever have existed in the first place. For Lacan, the fictive existence of the self as a whole in the first place better explains what is going on, and provides a safer theory of subjectivity. For the existentialist self is one given to inevitable conflict owing to the inevitable failing of identification. But the psychoanalytic self possesses narcissism as a limit to the faith in the self existing. All subjectivity is misrecognition, not non-recognition.

"What the #$%! is the internet?" - Jay

2008-12-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

Well, I've fought the tides for as long as I can. But I am sick and tired of ideas simply sliding into the ether. While I do an alright job of jotting down notions I get during job talks, exciting lunch chats with Michael Lawrence, and provocations lobbed by J, I need to make sure that all these ideas and thoughts I have get recorded somehow, and that they also get tested in the marketplace of ideas.

A blog seems an inevitability at this point. What will I try to do with it? I will post thoughts I have for papers and discussions. I might occasionally post a close reading a an academic text I have been working on. I will probably ask for professional/academic advice, on the hope that intelligent colleagues will read this blog. I might occasionally link to something really funny or entertaining (like this).

So, enough with the boring stuff. Hopefully my time at home will allow me to post something shortly.