Why the Tea Party Is and Is Not Overblown

(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

"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.

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:

Nope.

Is Performativity the Feminine Not-All?

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

We are never signifier or signified. We are stratified.

p. 67, A Thousand Plateaus

Chapter Two of Society Must be Defended

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).