The Ryan Pick

Was driving back from vacation yesterday (this was my first human, serious, and meaningful vacation in the last six years, and I wish I'd taken one sooner) and so I missed a lot of the chatter about Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential pick. Not that I'm a meaningful pundit or anything, but I'd put my money on Portman given the Romney campaign's compulsion for the standard and boring (not a knock btw: remember Sarah Palin?)

The Ryan selection was definitely a bit of a surprise (though perhaps not around the offices of The Weekly Standard) and what's notable is that both Democrats and Republicans seem happy about it. From NRO's editors, this pleased-as-punch declaration:

"Romney could have decided to run a vague and vacuous campaign based on the idea that the public would default to the out party in a bad economy. By selecting Ryan, he has ensured that the campaign will instead to a significant degree be about a conservative governing agenda."

As noted, this idea about Ryan's pick transforming the campaign into one of BIG IDEAStm  is a shared notion: Greg Sargent, in today's Wapo, agrees that the pick expands the agenda items for the campaign from a pure referendum on the economy to a bigger one about entitlements and government spending:

"The Ryan pick is also a break with Romney's previous theory of the race. He had previously intended to make the campaign about nothing more than a referendum on the economy and Obama's stewardship of it. Now it will be a choice between two starkly different ideological visions, one that drags the race onto the turf of tax fairness and entitlements--which is much more in line with the debate Dems wanted."

Dear readers, forgive me for not really understanding a lot of this. Who thinks the Obama administration wouldn't have continued to push heavily the set of arguments about the threat the GOP posed to Medicare, Medicaid, and other entitlements? And who expected the GOP to just ditch the "tax fairness" arguments if Romney had selected say, Rob Portman? These were already going to be major campaign issues. The degree of intensity of these arguments might perhaps be a bit higher, but the GOP's attempt to link higher taxes with current economic struggles has already been afoot since the leadup to the 2010 midterms. And what was the aim of Barack Obama's comments about the shared rather than individual character of economic achievement if not an attempt to indicate that government has an active and meaningful (read: funded) role to play in the lives of ordinary citizens?

Second point: these ideas are already more or less confused in, if not the minds, at least the emotions/affects of the electorate. Previous posts have addressed the attempts by organizations like Americans for Prosperity to create linkages in the minds of voters between the government's debt and the debt struggles of ordinary American households. While such tactics are disingenuous (no American household can rely on the kind of tax base that the federal government can) they can certainly prove effective, inasmuch as the government exists as an easy relay upon which American can project their hopes and anxieties. The feelings related to economic struggles are not do distinct from fears that your grandparents won't have medical care (and fears that you will be responsible for making their ends meet) and these are also not separable from the more conservative sentiments associated with economic anxieties related to a fear that one's own security could be threatened by those who are less responsible (even those who are well off economically do not "feel" economically secure owing to combinations of familial, professional, and social financial obligations, hard as that might be to rationalize occasionally). So a dispute about rising Medicare costs not only threatens the elderly (or those who imagine their futures as elderly) but also those who find those rising costs to be a threat to their own prosperity. This conflation of affects was already at work, though perhaps the Ryan pick underscores its importance.

Third point: racial optics. We now have an extraordinarily white (though not for the GOP) ticket that plans on lecturing a black guy for spending too much money. How is that going to play? We already have a sense that the base will love it (and I admit, this is often for reasons that cannot be reduced to race, but often the racial element in this cannot be ignored). Indeed, Scott Brown recently reconjured the "welfare queen" recently, and its difficult to dissociate such images from their implicated racial/political histories. It's no accident here that the "makers" are two "responsible and serious" white guys while the irrational and irresponsible "Barry" is the one incapable of balancing the budget, and I'd expect hay to be made out of that in the general by some rather noxious political elements. It will of course be coded and hidden but, its a sadly operational stereotype.

Affective Transference and Confusion. Or, Questioning "Julia"

Peter Kirsanow, a talented contributor to the well regarded conservative magazine National Review has a regular feature on their weblog The Corner called "Today's Questions for the President." Today's question is regarding the new federal advertising campaign featuring the fictional character "Julia," whose life story is told in concert with detailing and itemizing the benefits this fictional character derives in her life from government programs (You can watch an MSNBC segment on Morning Joe thats highly critical of the advertisement as well here). In a number of ways the campaign fails progressives in a way sure to generate distrust (Julia is white, wants children) out of its attempts to triangulate to a broader audience.

Kirsanow summarizes the enormous mounting weight of the federal debt, then asks, essentially, two questions: 1) how do you expect us to pay for this, and 2) what have you done to make sure there aren't more Julias who "need" federal assistance? (Just for fun, on the first case Kirsanow tosses in the typical reference to how much of Julia's benefits China will need to fund.)

We can set aside the larger debate about how deep the revenue crisis is (short answer on my perspective is: a more robust economy fixes that vast majority of all existing spending problems with the exception of Medicare, and yes, we have to be prepared to preserve Medicare with higher taxes on both the wealthy and the middle class. As far as more support for programs recently axed and reformed, in terms of cost those pale in comparison to the Medicare issue but are also resolvable with a better/broadly stronger economy. (So yes, if you have an axe to grind with people who think our taxes should be higher, you should grind it here.) What really interests me about the first claim is how it plays upon a certain kind of emotional confusion and transference that utilizes existing economic anxieties and makes the budgetary constraints faced by the government into an analogical phenomenon.

At least three major arguments are working in the background of Kirsanow's question. The first is the current anxiety over the European debt crisis, and Greece specifically. Check out for example this chart from Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) linked by The Weekly Standard that depicts how much debt America has on a per capita basis, and how our crisis is even worse than Greece's on a per capita basis (one issue I have with the graph is that is measures debt on a per capita basis but does not also account for the enormous potential overall wealth in the tax base nor differences in say, natural resources). If you want more anecdotal evidence, fire up twitter and search "Greece" "debt" and "Obama" and you'll find a multitude of posts (hashtagged "tcot" for "top conservatives on twitter") linking Obama to a future where the U.S. faces mass austerity riots just like the Greek government.

A second background operation being performed here is the insistence on debt as a supreme danger to the polity. This is often accomplished by recourse to analogies which position government spending and household spending as equivalences, in order to make the threat of debt existential. For just one example, look at the clever slide employed by Sarah Palin in her keynote address to the Tea Party Convention in Nashville Tennessee in 2010: governments she says, like households, are sunk if they can't balance their budgets. Such logic elides the fact that credit is not a necessary evil but is instead the lifeblood of any effectively functioning economy: sample any doomsday article from the 2008 financial crisis and you'll find out very quickly that the threat of mass credit paralysis loomed larger than any other problem as a central issue flowing from the banking and investment crisis. Another issue with the analogy is that households don't have tax bases while governments do: unless you like in a polity like California where there are constitutional restrictions on raising taxes, the truth is that the government is more capable of producing income on demand through the exercise of political will than a household is able to "will itself" to more income.

The third argument present is an implicit one as well, one that preys on the dimunization/reduction in overall agency in order to encourage an active identification with the government. A recent piece in Theory & Event did a nice job of identifying how the reduction in individual agency (economically, we might think about this as the reduction in real wages relative to inflation for the lower and middle class starting in the eighties) enabled easier identification with state power in the wake of September 11th. Massive expansions of government power were legitimized and indeed, identified with, by the citizenry because they were one way for citizens rendered inert and powerless to imagine themselves as capable of exercising some sort of agency. The piece, by Elisabeth Anker and called "Heroic Identifications: Or, You Can Love Me Too--I Am So Like the State" is wonderful because it outlines how people might come to think of themselves as aligned with the state, even though the structure of American political government is built to institute a difference between "the people" and the state for their own protection (cf. On Revolution by Hannah Arendt.) We might envision something like an obverse side of this agency argument occurring in this moment, where people, incapable of actually making ends meet on their own owing to increasing costs and stagnating wages (or perhaps to mortgages they couldn't really afford) experience the economic agony of the state (and the threat of bankruptcy). This allows them to experience the threat of economic destitution but through an externalization of the question of responsibility and action (understanding one's own role in ending up in a state of economic hardship is very difficult within the terms of liberal individualism that operate on the American discursive landscape; in part this accounts for the success of government-suspicious discourses like those of the Tea Party or previously the Birchers).

Checking out the MSNBC roundtable on the Julia ad supports this point: even the most "liberal" member of the roundtable doesn't think the video is helpful because, as avowed Marxist Mika Brezinski notes "I don't think it helps....we are at a state, time in this country where people feel there is no hope" and they don't wanted to be reminded that one of the only sources of hope is the government. Donnie Deutsch further underscores this point, reminding us that "Our character is John Wayne, rugged individualism...Yes the government is there, but we feel weak in that...nobody, not even a progressive guy like myself, wants to see America portrayed that way." Individualism offers the promise of success as a result of the competent exercise of individual agencies and faculties. When things are going bad, its a might bit more difficult to encourage broader introspection about the failure of individuals to contribute to a world that might have been otherwise (to do so might point inductively to a problem with liberal individualism on the whole). To the extent that discourses can focus on how bad a job the government has done, this might enable a disavowal of our individual roles in financial calamities (and I want to be clear: this can extend to ideological complicity with the status quo as much as it might be a decision to say, buy a flatscreen tv on layaway or take a large mortgage).

The difficult is that the government does do lots of things for lots of people all of the time. We drive on roadways produced by a federal government. We don't end up in the poorhouse because we're paying for an elderly relative's medical care (or at least, because of Medicare a lot fewer of us do). Local and state programs benefit us continuously  (and I would contend we may process federal and state policies in the imaginary quite differently, but that this separation might not survive much scrutiny). Many of us patronize organizations that benefit from federal tax exempt status. Those of us who don't make much money benefit from the EITC. And so on and so forth. One reason why this "Julia" video might have generated such scorn is precisely the reason identified by Brezinski and Deutsch: it hits too close to home. Our agency is routinely minimized and circumscribed, in sharp contrast with the "work hard, chicken in every pot, Chevy in the garage" narrative that we have been fed (and feed, when we buy into it and coproduce a reality that lines up with such thoughts).

We wallow in government debt because it does two things simultaneously: it affirms to us that we are like the government (struggling financially) while also reaffirming a traditional narrative sympathetic to the individual (the government is too incompetent to take care of itself.) Anxiety about the economic survival of a household is projected as a general condition of the government itself (even if this is not exactly true, as far as thing go: the government basically has a Visa card with a credit limit the size of the U.S. tax base). If the government and "the people" are both stuck in a financial crisis, then this gives cause to support the more radical sentiment (if not actual policy recommendations) that now matriculates from the small-government GOP base: rhetorics about taking our country back, calls that Obama is a socialist, etc. are all more intelligible if the fundamentals of the country are at stake as opposed to facing a temporary bump in the road.

Thus Kirsanow's second question (What have you done to ensure there are fewer Julias?") comes from an intelligible ideological position: it begins from the premise that strengthening the broader economy is more important than producing federal support programs. This is probably a belief that few in the Obama administration would disagree with, they would simply disagree with the causes of the economic collapse (market failures compared to say, heavy regulations/taxation). Starkly, the quesiton begins from the premise that individuals are entirely separate and distinct from the government as a natural order of things: the government might, through intervention, unmake and distort individuals, and only its exit from the market can restore a certain kind of order.

American exceptionalism has a long tradition. Some of it is about proving that we are definitely better than other countries (Manifest Destiny and whatnot) while other elements are actually about demonstrating our exceptional victimage (9/11 as a sign of our divine ability to suffer, struggle, and rebuild). Sometimes, these goals intersect, as in this case, where the real credit crisis in another country is taken to be an index of the future that America might face, one that can only be overcome by a kind of divine double down on the will, strength, and redoubtable power of the individual. This move  is secured by the production of a government that is exceptionally poor at managing its budget by pointing to its enormous debt load. The result of this is to analogize the government to households, which elides/obscures the fact that plenty of well functioning households do, to some extent, carry debt and oftentimes are incapable of paying all their bills on a month to month basis. Rather than encounter this second fact as an opportunity for ironic introspection about how exactly lives are lived, we turn to the repetition of anti-government jeremiads which, by condemning the government for its inefficiency and incompetence, serve to repeat and reify our clever and centralized trust in our selves against the external Other of the government.

Affects are structures of feelings. These structures of feelings operate, according to some, prior to signification and the function of language. They help to answer the question of desire (or if you prefer in English, the question of how a narrative comes to be or cohere even when there is not necessarily a ready-made reading guide for the consumer). Why the repetition of certain themes, structures, ideas, and modes of thinking? It's owed not to some arbitrary force, but rather to repetitions, and how repetitions are appealing in and of themselves because they are familiar (familiarity does some work to certify something like "truthiness"). We constantly "re-up" the familiar because we are invested  in it (see Lauren Berlant's brilliant essay "Cruel Optimism" for a more extensive treatment of this subject). Wallowing in the fantastic struggles of the government to make ends meet helps produce a continuously familiar world, one where the government's own incompetence covers over something else about broader levels of competence amongst the civic folk. That is to say: what is familiar is our goodness, and what is also familiar is the untrustworthiness of the Other. Private anxieties, privately earned, are transfered to the public as public anxieties, earned "publicly" but by no individual, owned instead by the monolithic "government" who bureaucratic failings provide a ready made explanation for the crisis. In this way personal struggles are externalized, and the just rage of the economically deprived can be understood as a public phenomenon, evading the liberal judgment that would be visited upon those whose economic issues were understood in advance as private.

O'Blogging on St. Patrick's Day: Main St./Wall St.

The emergence of the Wall St./Main St. theme in the 2008 presidential campaign was a crucial narrative moment. While political narratives opposing the "big city" economists to the ordinary economic agents of flyover America are as old as the progressive populism espoused by William Jennings Bryan (if not older), the salience of such themes fades in and out of public circulation on the basis of several contextual factors, including A) the current state of the economy, B) class sensitivity, and C) the visibility of the moneyed and urbane. While previous outbreaks of outrage at white collar workers for financial improprieties had been seen not only during the Great Depression but also during the S&L scandals of the 1980's, the Wall St./Main St. division that erupted in September 2008 was particularly important because it happened at the height of a hard fought presidential campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Almost as soon as the financial woes of Lehman Bros. were made public, a Wall St./Main St. narrative began to emerge in the media. On September 15, the Chicago Tribune reported that "Few Americans have a direct connection to the events unfolding on Wall Street, but practically everyone has a stake in the game." By September 18th it was reported in The Business Times that Wall Street had fundamentally "lost touch" with the economy. The explicit use of language contrasting Wall St. with Main St. increased, and became a staple of presidential campaign rhetoric up until the early November election.

Rhetorical theory teaches us one way to read the emergence of these discourses is that they serve as ways of ordering or making more understandable a world riven with anxiety and indeterminacy. As Kenneth Burke argues, the production of scapegoats is part of a ritual of victimage which serves to consolidate a collective identity in ways that render negative or threatening political circumstances as emerging in opposition to said collective identity. Rhetorical theorists have tended to focus on the political implications resulting from the use of such rhetoric, whether in Burke's incredibly important essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle" or more contemporary efforts like Brian Ott and Eric Aoki's work on Matthew Shepherd, Jeremy Engels work on Nietzchean victimage, and Richard Nixon, or Barry Brummett's work on symbolic form.

Engels' essay is of particular interest to me, as his argument in his Rhetoric Society Quarterly essay "The Politics of Resentment and the Tyranny of the Minority" is about how scapegoating as a political ritual perpetuates its subjects' victimized status by allowing them to perpetually wallow and identify with their sense of resentment and anger at the world. Rather than understanding anger and anxiety as temporary conditions, Engels understands that there are rhetorical mechanisms that prolong these rituals of victimization. An angle I want to add is that it seems that there are also ways in which scapegoating discourses may unknowingly or unthinkingly perpetuate the angers and resentments they attempt to foster.

In the case of the "Wall St./Main St." binary, blaming Wall St. may have the effect of accelerating rather than postponing an existential crisis for the aggrieved subject. As has been written elsewhere and ad nauseam, American politics and society is saturated with a notion that the liberal individual is an absolute sovereign, and the individual choices/decisions carry a certain kind of legitimacy not on the basis of the results they create but instead from their simple, tautological status as individual decisions. Such a fantasy works with efficacy during times of relative economic prosperity because the individual investment into the economy at large is validated with recourse to a simple kind of correspondence: I am both acting and living, and the economy is going along well. We would expect, then, during times of economic destitution and crisis, that the capacity and competency of the self as an individual actor would be threatened, because a flailing economy indexes the flailingness of those subjects operating within it.

Here is where the scapegoating mechanisms of "Wall St./Main St." come in: blaming Wall St. for the large scale 2008 financial crisis resolves the crisis offered by economic disrepair by distributing the responsibility for blame at levels far above that of the average American. Such a maneuver taps into a historically rich tableau of populist narratives which paint good and hardworking "normal" Americans against an opposed and greedy moneyed class. However, what goes overlooked is that this rhetoric may actually serve to exacerbate rather than reduce the anxiety and tension in American subjects. After all, in order to believe the finance derivates, greedy financial managers, and loan-crazy banks were behind the financial crisis, one has to admit to their own lack of agency in the realm of economic affairs. Because most people have moved away from the "storing money under a mattress" financial model, they conceive of themselves as public economic actors. One needs nearly spend time detailing the wealth of financial avenues available to "normal" people, like the website eTrade which promises to elevate everyone's individual economic judgment to the plane of Wall Street and enable them to make their own sound investment decisions. However, in the case of a broad financial collapse, very few people are immune from financial ruin: not only because many people unknowingly or unwittingly invest their money in unstable sectors of the economy, but also because of a general credit crunch that results from a constricted financial environment.

One result of the "Wall St./Main St." demagoguery, then, is that it evacuates the agency of Main Street. Main St. can only be the passive victim of Wall St.'s sinister machinations if it has little to no say in the matter. This might not ordinarily be a problem, except that because of the tightly held fantasy of individual choice, the evacuation of "average America's" agency is not a minor matter but instead an assault upon the constitutive fantasy of individual identity: that the exercise of individual choice, is in and of itself, meaningful and tends towards "the good." Piling onto this is the rather massive "perspective by incongruity" that would be witnessed were Americans to interrogate their own investments and roles in the financial collapse: even if you believe that the 2008 financial crisi was primarily the fault of derivatives traders and an economic system going off the rails, it is undeniable that a collective investment in the idea of individual economic security contributes to Americans rolling the dice on risky financial decisions like "out of their depth" home loans.

Many have wondered why the political era of the Obama presidency has been besotten with extreme political rhetoric. (It is unclear whether this rhetoric is worse than in the past, but its effects on creating an atmosphere of partisanship in the Congress is uniquely terrible). I think one cause of this (aside from the obvious inputs of Obama's race, a collapse of the classic "southern states" strategy started by Richard Nixon, and the slow creep of pseudo-libertarianism into a central position in the GOP architecture) is that the 2008 financial crisis was as symbolically important as it was in real economic terms: the truth of it radically threatened to pull out the rug from the fantasy of liberal individualism held near and dear (and it should be noted, a support of liberal individualism is a fairly bipartisan fantasy). The initial anger over the collapse, which political operatives then doubled down on by facilitating and encouraging the "bailout anger" which eventually condensed around Rick Santelli to produce the Tea Party movement, was an anger that allowed subjects to disavow their own relatively miniscule agency in affairs of the economy, a miniscule amount of agency that would be tough to square with the pervasive fantasy of individual action as highly economically meaningful. The bipartisan character of this sentiment can also be seen in the emergence of the Occupy movement: both parties seem to understand that the economy is "bigger than all of us" but struggle to articulate intelligible demands to remedy the problem of extreme power disparities in our political climate (for the record, I think the incoherence of the Tea Party's political agenda signals that their disavowal is considerably more tragic: Occupy refuses to "double down" on the liberal individual for the most point, and its supposed "unintelligible demands" are a sign of its politicization of the economy rather than a kind of failure of New Social Movement).

We might then think about economic demagoguery as a type of particularly uncontrollable political rhetoric of scapegoating: in order for an audience to acede to its major premise, a major premise of American subjectivity itself is challenged and threatens. Because our identities are structured in the form of a sort of a defensive armor (qua Lacan) we should expect the defensive maneuveres on the part of identity in response to this existential threat to manifest themselves in the active affects and politically contentious discourses and actions of our current milieu.

Weird Dissertation Crowdsourcing

finding myself in something of a mental cul-de-sac: do these paragraphs seem as insane to you as they do to me?

In Bell’s explanation, the promise of liberalism finds its broad appeal in the basis of projecting an infinitely successful future, and that future is purchased with the exercise of exquisite individual judgment. In her words, “liberalism contains a necessary but potentially destabilizing point at which the ability to make promises joins the ability to hesitate, and, by the tracing of lines of causality, to imagine the future differently. The possibility of beginning anew, the possible moment at which promises are exchanged and plans laid down is a profoundly political moment.”[i] Bell uses political here in the Arendtian sense of commons making: liberalism ties people together with the promise that they might, through the exercise of individual agency, make a new community. Interestingly, the status of the indivduals that are the subject of these appeals is what makes the situation necessary but destabilizing: it is necessary that individual choice be absolute, but choice itself could potentially choose no choice. This parallels the problem of democratic representation as enunciated by Rousseau: “the people” may exist but if “the people” only exist as an interiority of themselves, their legitimacy will collapse through lack of external point of identification against. There would be a kind of lack of reflexivity about who the people are that would prove fatal to mass publicity. Similarly, individualism has to extract an infallible vision of the self out of a founding which nevertheless owes itself to the incredible fallibility underscored by the fact of subjectivity itself: the separation and owed fealty of one subject to another, made through the divisional character of language itself.

Explaining this admittedly obtuse point requires a turn to Jacque Lacan’s essay “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipation Certainty: A New Sophism.” Like many of Lacan’s short essays, this one features a confusing parable. Centered around a prison warden offering a certain gambit to prisoners, the conceit that frames the essay is that the warden offers three prisoners a chance to escape from their confinement but only if they guess right in a curious game of the warden’s choosing. In his formulation, the warden places 5 prisoners in a holding cell, where he will possess five disks “differing only in color: three white and two black.”[ii] The warden will fasten one disc to each prisoner, and the prisoners will be able to examine the discs on the other prisoners, but forbidden from verbally communicating the knowledge they derive to the other prisoners. “The first to be able to deduce his own color will be the one to benefit from the discharging material” and allowed to leave.[iii] Of course sheer guesswork will not suffice: any prisoner knowing their designation must also be able to “show their work” by providing a logical account of how they know. Moreover, the sneaky warden uses only the white disks. Lacan gives his reader the “perfect solution” from the inmates, a solution which appears to circumvent the warden’s own trickery:

I am 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 straight away that he was a white and would have realized straight away that he was a white and 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. At that, I made for the door to make my conclusion known.[iv]

While this solution is valid, in the sense with which we in argument are intimately familiar, the validity of the solution requires that the reader ignore a curious game of time being played by the inmates in their answer. Specifically, in order to formulate this opinion as stated, the element of time must be obviated or elided from one’s consumption of the account given by the prisoners. The moment of deduction cannot be said to properly exist, because at each moment where the deduction of color occurs a kind of simultaneity that cannot be coterminous with the movement resulting from the deduction is nevertheless drawn from the decision to make a move. As Lacan notes, even if the first motion followed the logic given by the prisoners, the shared movement of all towards the door should inspire a second halt, at which the surefooted movements of each other infect each prisoner with doubt as to their color. Nevertheless, the prisoners can infer from this second cessation that his disc is white, as if his disk were black the other actors would have had no need of stopping. The actions themselves certify the “white-dottedness” of the prisoners.

Lacan declares that this solution is “valid” although perhaps not true. Nevertheless, its validity is what matters for the purposes of telling a kind of parable about subjectivity. Much like the prisoners in his tale, human subjects come to know their own subjectivity only through the production of a logical exclusion: that is, in Lacan’s “mirror stage” where a subject encounters another subject, and then formulates a seemingly coherent (yet constantly fractured) identity by excluding and exteriorizing the image seen in the mirror. Crucially, this annexation nevertheless locks subjects into a kind of fealty with their mirroristic Other, for without that figure, the self would have no cause to exist. This identification is not “true” of course: subjectivity is itself a kind of armor of fiction, an insistence of coherence in the face of a world so wide and complex that the affirmation of utter incoherence (and a lack of agency) would perhaps be more “true.” But subjectivity is valid: it establishes its own terms, and much like the halting prisoner’s in Lacan’s story, then verifies and makes more permanent this identity through a series of self-confirming halting glances. Combined with the actions taken (either by the prisoners to move towards the door or of subjects to gesture through speech towards their own totality) and we have a tautologically constituted but nevertheless valid recipe for subjectivity: the belief that one is a subject. Much as the belief that each of the prisoners hold that they have white disks is guaranteed and solidified by their decision to move towards the door, and confirmed by “valid” readings of their circumstance, so too does human subjectivity confirm itself through the exercise of a nonetheless tautologically constructed faculty: the faculty of human reason itself, which takes its own exercise to confirm the fact of its existence.

Both these engines are driven through one careful elision: the elision of the moment of reflexive judgment itself. Lacan is quick to point out that there is no spatial logic that could hold the decisions of the prisoners are logically valid because such judgments rely on a criminally unsophisticated model of communication as something like a sender/receiver model, which understands that what matters is the positive content communicated by actions. Such an understanding compresses the logic of the subject into a clear and linear mode of reasoning, when is at odds with the reasoning actually on display. To believe otherwise assumes that each subject is totally and completely free of the information provided by the actions of others: moreover, such a model of temporality spatializes in such a way that one has to assume the actions/decisions taken by a subject are the result of a particular line of reasoning rather than co-conspirators in producing the validity of that very reasoning itself. The spatial form of logic itself helps to reinforce the very myth of coherence that contributes to our ability to imagine what Joseph Frank calls “the actions and event of a particular time only as the bodying for of eternal prototypes…this timeless world of myth…finds its appropriate aesthetic expression in spatial form.”[v] To put it another way: no syllogism makes sense without our assuming the coherence of the form of the syllogism as a given fact. Similarly, the actions and account given of the actors within Lacan’s parable make a total amount of sense within the assumption of the narrative when they take the actions as he describe them occurring, but without their actions the logical solution they give (and the solution they find) could never have been. These actions of a particular time make the eternal prototype of logic meaningful in terms of communicating their reasoning. There is no universal which can make any sense without the set of particulars that make it make sense.

---

[i] Bell, "The promse of liberalism and the performance of freedom," 82.

[ii] Jacques Lacan, "Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty--A New Sophism," in Ecrits, ed. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2004), 161.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid., 162.

[v] Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 63-64.

Of Barack and Bell

Here's a major problem with the next Breitbart-collective's move to sully Obama by linking him to Derrick Bell: in order for people to be terrified about an association, the associate has to have been well known enough beforehand to count as a serious "threat" to whatever conservative vision of America is circulating. To put it another way, you want people to be able to work using quick enthymemes, especially given the fast nature of campaign cycles/twitter. That kind of cognitive/argumentative speed doesn't attach when you first A) circulate a video of Obama saying some kind words about a dude and then B) have to take time explaining just who that dude was and why he's bad news for America. Moreover, for an opposition figure to be a real threat they have to be somehow hegemonic...at least Bill Ayers could fit neatly into a kind of "commie subversive" archetype that used to do a lot of work in America. Its unclear what Bell triggers other than just "being Black" which is, admittedly, a trigger for some brands of conservative politics but not exactly the sorts that will help you win median voters come November. Perversely, the success of a certain kind of neoliberalism in neutralizing race as a meaningful category for political contestation also means that bringing up race as an attempt to sully a political opponent is fundamentally less potent a threat than it was previously, since race is reduced to an almost accidental category of circumstance rather than the strongly ontological function it serves for a left-progressive coalition. Once one is conditioned to believe that race does not argue, one is simultaneously conditioned to believe that "race" warrants less rebuttal or merit then it once did.

This move reeks of desperation: the best "vetting" the Breitbart media consortium could come up with is Obama giving a kind and somewhat humorous introduction of a law professor 20 years or so ago? In general, these political strategies which hold someone's youthful self to be coterminus with their current self fail to even meet a laugh test: college certainly influences how people view the world but it does not determine in the last instance. Otherwise we'd have a lot more folks in their late thirties drinking a lot of Keystone Light. Moreover, attachment does not guarantee agreement: how many folks read Hegel or Marx in college and yet remained unpersuaded as to their merits? This incident underscores how conservative discourse about Obama vacillates between two poles: on one hand, it must understand Obama (and his followers) as guileless ideologues subject to being persuaded very quickly about any reductionist ideological thesis with which they are confronted (see: Wright, Jeremiah), but on the other hand, Obama has to be an incredibly sinister and sophisticated individual capable of separating his public persona (serious minded progressive/moderate) from his actual Marxist/"racist" roots in a nearly pathological manner.

Retroactively Approaching the 2008 Financial Crisis

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

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.