Reagan's "Morning in America"

Critics have identified the short campaign ad “Morning in America” from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign as one of the most effective—and influential—campaign ads of all time. No doubt the ad stands out for not only the context, which was one the most successful presidential campaigns of all time, one that saw Reagan crush his challenger Walter Mondale by taking 49 out of 50 states, but also for its content, which presented a bucolic and peaceful view of regular American life, one that Reagan compared favorably to the social upheaval of the 1960’s and the economic difficulties of the late 1970’s.

            Reagan’s appearance at this juncture, positioned neatly between the upheaval that ushered in and undermined Richard Nixon but before the end of the Cold War, has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. I want to here meditate on several different readings from critical scholars that often focus on one aspect of Reagan: his status as a simulation. Diane Rubenstein reads Reagan’s presidency as a kind of Baudrillardian simulation par excellence, a president who seemingly stood for nothing and in so doing could be the concept of America itself. While other leaders like John Kennedy or Dwight Eisenhower could draw on the kingly residues of the nation’s higher office with either reference to bodily charisma (Kennedy’s sexuality) or military prowess (Eisenhower’s role as Supreme Allied Commander), the trappings of the old sovereign understanding of the king also constrained and threatened these leaders, subordinating their charisma and power to the Ego-Ideal of a perfect, universally powerful (and religiously designated) leader.

While I am often loathe to draw on his work, Rubenstein’s deployment of Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal wherein signs serve not a representational function but instead a self-referential one, ushers us into  an era where “territory no longer precedes the map but is generated by it” (p. 584).  This concept explains Reagan’s success in a way purely semiotic theory cannot: a representational account of language is often frustrated by a figure like Reagan precisely because the presence of “objective” indicators of his flaws as president—scandals, wars, an interest in astrology—did not in practice collapse Reagan’s presidency. Suspended between the subjective understanding of Reagan’s failures as a policymaker and his enormous symbolic political capital is this self-referential status of the Reagan presidency: Reagan and the America he was a part of were separated tautologically from the crisis and disasters that attended to his time in office.

          In this way Reagan can admit to the arms-for-hostages deal while remaining distant from any responsibility for it, as Rubenstein notes that Reagan’s statement “’I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that it is true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.’” (p. 587). Even when there is a real problem, Americans continue to feel as if everything is ok. “Morning in America” produces—anticipates even—this sense of good feeling even in the face of still troublesome conditions. Hence Rubenstein’s point about maps generating territory; much the same could be said for political space, drawing a connection to theorists working in the area of publicity.

          Michael Warner focuses on how Reagan’s image made him the “champion spokesmodel for America” in Warner’s words (p. 173). The phrase “spokesmodel,” seems intentionally gendered here: a “spokesman” pitches a product while a “spokesmodel” is feminized, simply displaying , gesturing, and pointing to a desirable object, generating a symmetry between their own sexual desirability and the object. Reagans capacity to instill identification with his audiences, even where this identification was not selfsame with popularity in the public polls, was such that he could be said to have an immense amount of political capital in the sense that those who insulted him found themselves constrained, and those who opposed him politically found themselves the subject of public ire.  Like “the people” Reagan does not have speech, he simply stands in to point to America’s self-referential goodness, in much the same way that people simply living their lives in “Morning in America” provide the proof that America is a great nation. In having seemingly little agency or persona, Reagan mirrored the impotence of the public. Warner’s reading works similarly to that of Joan Copjec, who argues in Read My Desire that Reagan’s impotence was constitutive of his authority rather than evidence of a lack. Identifying with Reagan did not threaten one’s sense of self in the way that embracing a charismatic John F. Kennedy or a geographically-specific George W. Bush might. As an added bonus, such signifying does not invoke Ernst Kantorowicz’s theory of royal power, producing a president capable of living up to symbolic expectations, ones that merely ask for a president to be like “the people” rather than one who is above and rules them in a manner guaranteed to activate that traditionally American robust ideology of individualism.

            Citizens, Warner says, long for “privileged public disembodiment” (p. 176).  Abstraction is the key technology for producing the modern public sphere, and where consumerism substitutes for civic participation, citizens seek to consume in a way that reduces that anxieties associated with existing. Reagan’s befuddlement made him one of the citizens. Reagan could thus witness disasters with the citizenry. Moreover, he could, like cititzens, admit to some rational level of culpability for a disaster or scandal, but maintain his emotive, human distance from them. In line with Warner’s work, this model of present distancing from politics explains how citizens might routinely cathetic to a political system that rarely, if ever, serves their interests: they “rationally” know it to be true but feel otherwise, and feeling trumps.

            It is telling that “Morning in America” includes no disasters, no threats, only a happy and bucolic nation rising to meet the day. It also includes no persons of color. The ad opens in the morning hours, showing people either working or on their way to it. Amongst the various occupations depicted are paperboy, farmer, firefighter, and white-collar work. The first twenty seconds of the advertisement are dedicated to commerce:  folks either go to or are at work, or engage in acts of commerce: a voice over mentions increasing volumes of home purchasing while the ad shows some presumably new homeowners marching a large, just-purchased rug into their new house. Meanwhile the voiceover reminds that “more Americans will go to work this morning than ever before in the nation’s history” while commenting on the remarkable drops in interest rates, contrasting the Reagan recovery with the difficult days of Jimmy Carter. These are not just the conditions that facilitate prosperity: they are prosperity.

Following these displays of commerce, the video transitions into the scene of a smiling, elderly woman watching a young, heterosexual couple getting married, while the narrator adds that today “6500 young men and women will be married.” The narrator then notes that, with today’s lower inflation rates, these married couples can anticipate economic prosperity will remain stable. Out of 53 seconds of content in the advertisement, fully 15 seconds are dedicated to the events of this marriage, which include not only the walk down the aisle but the smiling procession into wedded bliss: not to mention, a prosperous future. The closing embrace between the grandmother and her newly-married granddaughter, both clad in white, transforms into the US Capitol building in a screen transition, symbolically producing these ordinary Americans living their life with a prosperous future, emphasizing how the center of American life is the population itself, rather than the government. In fact, this appearance of the Capitol—along with a brief shot of a firefighter schoolchildren, and some soldiers raising the American flag—are the only shots of government agents in the entire commercial until Reagan’s face appears at the end. It is of course notable that the shot is of the Capitol: the building that houses a multitude of, rather than one, of America’s leaders, creating a kind of relay of multiciplicity that reinforces Reagan’s version of populism.

            Indeed, after this brief shot of the Capitol we repeatedly see American flags, being raised in the morning in a variety of different contexts like schools and military bases. This, we are told, is the daily life of America: marriage, work, learning, symbolic acts of patriotism. We see a carpool taking someone to work, the hug from grandmother to granddaughter, people smiling and waving. The message is clear: the American people are doing very well, very well indeed. And this happy shared living mirrors the economic prospects of the nation. If Reagan’s “Time for Choosing” could manufacture anxiety our of prosperity, and if Nixon’s silent majority gave Americans a way to make sense of the chaos of the 60’s without indicting themselves,  “Morning in America” made the fact of living, of going about one’s quotidian business into tactile proof that America was on the right path.

            Indeed, this calm morning exists in part because of one major absence, the absence of the government.  Though the ad is for Reagan’s presidential campaign, Reagan himself does not appear until the last few seconds of the advertisement. While there are agents of the government present, it is almost always figures who represent either local government—firefighters and schoolteachers—or civic necessities, like the aforementioned firefighters or officers of the military. Government here is mostly absent, present only when there is threat to life and property (fire, war) or when so localized that it can be directly connected to the community will, as in the schoolhouse. Otherwise the life of the community is defined by their own acts: commerce, labor, love, with no government present.

            It bears noting that this population is industrious, virtuous, hardworking, and finding fulfillment in their relations with one another. The absence of inflation and the reduction of other economic negatives, combined with the felt positivity of the Americans living their lives in the ad campaign suggest an America where prosperity of the population mirrors the economic prosperity generally. That these are achieved in the absence of the state is no accident. After all, the idea that the default character of the American “people” is that of a peace and prosperity is a very old notion, but politicians have maneuvered around in it in a number of different ways. Nixon’s silent majority worked by producing peace and prosperity as the desire of most Americans, and used the appearance of instability, protest, and dissent throughout America to confirm and reassure those who felt anxious and troubled that what was occurring was not the “real” America. Nixon, of course, was fighting a pitched battle against a more-or-less openly legitimate social welfare state. By Reagan’s time, this consensus had begun to crumble, and so Reagan’s production of calm as the appropriate character of the movement works to suggest America is on the right path.

            Establishing that the American people were in the process of returning the nation to its greatness helped to create conditions felicitous for American conservatives to rewrite American civil space as a site for pitched battles between on the one hand a peaceable, hardworking and family-driven—and flatly, white—majority of Americans one one side against “political” individuals who attack and threaten to undermine “traditional” American cultural mores by pointing out asymmetries in power and existing injustices. Cindy Patton argues in “Refiguring Social Space” that the new right articulated a neutral concept of “civil rights” as the simple right of individual—here conflated with cultural—existence. In this way groups begging for “special rights” like the Equal Rights Amendment were fracturing and violating American civil rights by watering down the “real” struggles of the Civil Rights Movement through particularizing identity maneuvers that performatively eradicate the consensus even as they testify to the attraction attendant to the fantasy of a smooth and consensus-ridden democratic public. Conservatism needed these particularizations to threaten something, and that something was Morning in America. The other step in this process was for conservative rhetors to matriculate state-phobia from its Cold War context into a more useful mechanism for understanding domestic politics, a theme I will soon return to at length.

A Response To Douthat: On the Incommensurability of GOP Economics and Populism

Eric Cantor’s shocking primary defeat last night dealt a blow to the conventional wisdom that this would be the year of the Republican establishment. Cantor, a key and visible voice on the right, was not the sort of politician who falls victim to a primary challenge. His position high up in the Republican leadership structure should have implied that he was almost untouchable, certainly in a year where midterm elections would mean major gains and victorious consolidations amongst Republicans, rather than defeats. And yet Cantor lost.

For those of us keeping our eyes in the levels of partisan intensity in Washington, this was not reassuring. Certainly, David Brat’s victory came as good news to many on the populist right: Cantor, despite his conservative bona fides, is certainly an “Establishment” figure, while on the left, many progressives took to social media to crow about how Cantor, who often comes off as unnecessarily snide, got what he deserved. Yet, Cantor’s record as a voter was solidly conservative. His primary challenge owes more to the generally totalizing character of the conservative base over the last few years than any real policy decisions. Cantor was a big-time conservative, he acted pretty conservative, and his flirtations with immigration policy were overblown. So, what does his defeat mean?

Ross Douthat writes in today’s Times in a piece titled “After Eric Cantor” that Cantor’s loss suggests a problem Cantor the politician, no conservative politics per se. Perhaps Cantor just couldn’t bridge the gap between the populist sentiment driving Obama-era conservative politics and populist policy that aims to enrich the “middle class” of America’s Main Street rather than those much reviled fat cats on Wall Street. If only, Douthat holds, conservatism could coalesce around a “good” economic populism rather than a “bad” populism. Douthat outlines what these dynamics are in an earlier op-ed, where the good populism consists of channeling Rand Paul on anger at government surveillance and security overreaches alongside tax plan’s like those of Utah Senator Mike Lee, which encourage increased tax relief for families. This also includes some kind of policy of real regulation to punish Wall Street for cronyism, corruption, and financial loss.

Douthat opines that, perhaps this victory is a good sign that the Republican Party is moving in the right direction. Or, at the very least, he hopes that it is. But I think Douthat’s assumption, which holds that there are two kinds of potentially agreeable populisms that are fighting for the soul of the Republican Party, is wrong in my estimation. In fact, it is a battle between the real populist sentiment of a conservative base (who take as their animating ethos anger and resentment at the 2008 financial collapse and the resulting bailouts (and who have, to some extent, matriculated some of that intensity to President Barack Obama and issues like Obamacare and the stimulus package) versus the traditional economic wing of political conservatism which focuses on generating freer markets by having a presumption against thick regulation in many areas of policy.

What these factions don’t necessarily share are goals. For example, Mike Lee’s tax plan aimed at boosting and stabilizing the American middle class might, in fact, do so, but at the expense of the deficit. . Lee’s goal is economic stability in the sense of making things easier for households. Rising budget deficits are, of course, a total non-starter for many on the traditional conservative side, who see the need to control spending as a political cudgel that can be used to facilitate connections in the minds of voters between their own economic anxieties and federal budget issues. Others, who come from the trickle down school, certainly claim to want to increase the economic welfare of the middle class as well but set certain federal baselines for this: hence the need to protection against budget deficits at all costs, demands for balanced budget amendments to the Constitution, and what have you.

None of this discussion within the realm of economic policy even begins to address cultural conservatives, who were already alienated at a formal level by the Tea Party’s insistence that they focus not on cultural issues but only on economics. While in practice the Tea Party’s broad opposition to government still allowed traditionalists conservatives to align themselves with the movement, what their role is in the current legislative majority in the House (and soon, lets face it, probably in the Senate) remains murky. Are conservatives angry about legalized gay marriage going to be placated with a tax credit for families?

In sum, the choice is not between good or bad populism. On one side is a populism, as The Weekly Standard hopes, that might offer various economic benefits for middle Americans by tax breaks on the middle class, the preservation or perhaps mild extension of social safety nets, and real regulation of white collar and financial crime. On the other side is a conservative populism of negativity which rages against Obamacare, budget deficits, and the denigration of the Constitution, but offers little in the way of a governing strategy to pair with these frustrations. Indeed, it is these conservatives who most often seem prone to engage in language about “makers and takers” or “economic losers,” suggesting the remedy comes not at the policy level but instead at the level of individual behavior. I do not think this gap between various conservative groups can be bridged, but instead will require some kind of at least medium term movement that will alienate the latter to strengthen the former. Cantor’s defeat signals prolonged partisanship, not a new political dawn with more action at hand.

The Proliferation of Emptiness: Indexing Politics in Party Platforms

This blog post is third in a series of posts focusing on looking at conservative messaging and ideological documents from 2009-present.

Pundits and critics tend to regard party platforms with something between and eye roll and a vague nod of the head. During every presidential election season the major political parties in the U.S. refine and produce their platforms but these documents are often thought to have little consequence. Willard Oliver and Nancy Marion, for example, pick up the work of Murray Edelman to suggest that these platform statements serve symbolic rather than practical functions.

The standard line goes something like this: party platforms are empty pabulum, stuffed chock full of the least controversial and most conventional set of beliefs possessed by a party. In turn this suggests that one might find in a platform are a set of no-brainers pitched to the party’s base: policies and ideologies that are, for the party membership, easy points of consensus. Given that the role of the party has intensified in American politics, especially since the end of the Sixties, it should come as no surprise that these documents tend to be full of red meat for the base.

Of course things might also change given whether or not a particular party holds a position of leadership in government, especially the presidency. When a party is outside of power, there is a tendency for party leadership to craft a platform that contains criticism of existing policies, and promises to roll them back. Negativity is easier than positivity: criticism is simpler, and less politically fraught, than criticism combined with a policy alternative.

If one looks at the 2004 Democratic political platform, one might begin under the presumption that the document might be full of negative criticism of the administration of George W. Bush, whose foreign policy adventurism was the chief issue in that year’s presidential election. However, a read through of this platform shows a number of specific policy proposals on matters foreign and domestic. Ranging from increased fuel efficiency standards for cars to eliminating federal subsides for predatory college lenders, and all the way to more Arabic language training for military translators, the 2004 platform is full of policy prescriptions. While the document is certainly critical of the Bush administration it pairs this criticism with many specific policy proposals.

An examination of the 2012 Republican platform, then, is a study in contrasts. The stage of course is a bit different from 2004. Following the 2008 presidential election and the legislative victories of Barack Obama, including the passage of a stimulus bill and major health care reform, a wave of conservative populism exploded onto the American political scene. Marking the first explicitly populist conservative movement in America (contrasted with the implicit populism of Nixon’s “silent majority” and Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party movement rode a wave of economic anger and existential anxiety to a robust showing in the 2010 midterm elections. Of course, the visibility of this movement belied one of its origins: demographic concerns. The 2008 election results foreshadowed what Barack Obama’s non-white figure underscored: the changing makeup of the American electorate might push politics further and further from the field of the familiar for many conservatives. The anti-Obama sentiment animating much of conservatism thus diverges from what Charles Krauthammer identified in 2003 as “Bush Derangement Syndrome” not because of the different figure chosen: indeed, cults of personality manifest themselves in many ways. Instead what is key is the stylistic difference in the response, that is, the response to Bush took the form of a political campaign routed through the organs of the Democratic Party along with traditional anti-war protests (albeit on a much smaller scale than during, say, Vietnam) while opposition to Obama took the form of highly visible protest movements framed in a language of populism (“the people”) rather than a language of humanism, as was the case with much anti-militarist agitation.

The 2012 Republican platform has four striking characteristics indicating its roots in oppositional negativity. First, the document contains more than sixty references to the figure of “the people” or “the American people,” and especially includes a vast number of references to their intrinsic value as workers, thinkers, and producers. This is an enormous number of references. For comparison, there are roughly 10 such references in the 2004 Democratic platform, so it is not simply a matter of anti-incumbency politics. Second there are over fifty references to the values of the American constitution. Third, the platform contains an abundance of references to issues that are so common sense that they perhaps lose all sense of partisan meaning. For example on page 43 there is a reference to ensuring that the votes of troops serving abroad are counted. No doubt, the votes of America’s soldiers are important. Military voting issues, however, are rarely the subjects of political sniping, so why list them here? Similarly, the domestic policy section supports “a national registry for convicted child murderers.” Well, who doesn’t? Who even knew that was a thing? Fourth, the document at many moments simply asserts Republican support for various economic and societal institutions, as opposed to recommending policies in regards to them. They say, for example, that the mortgage interest deduction taxation credit must be defended. No one is threatening it. They state their support for English as the nation’s official language, and emphasize with regards to immigration that the government intensify its enforcement of existing laws rather than creating more comprehensive reform. Indeed the “enforce existing laws” trope reappears often through the document.[i]

The platform’s focus on reassuring its audience that it has faith in the American “people,” fealty to the Constitution, a commitment to common sense policies, and a commitment to enforce existing regulations rather than promulgate new ones suggests a document in search of a very broad audience. Indeed, these four bullet points, reframed as rhetorical questions, produce what one might call an almost universal audience of American voters. Politicians almost never question the rationality of “the people” in either explicit or implicit terms. Many regard the Constitution as an unimpeachable document. Laws are made under the assumption that they will be enforced.

Audiences, and their identities, do not exist in a vacuum. To have a sense of who one is politically also requires one to have a sense of who one is not. When writers like Michael Warner talk about how audiences are created over and against negativity, they mean that there are supposedly opposed audiences who do not share the interpretive frame, or perhaps ideology, of a text’s “main” audience. So while one might support concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” one does so operating on the presumption that, somewhere out there, there are people who do not share this presumption, and their existence warrants one’s own need to commit to a program in defense of such concepts.

Many have commented on recent reports like those of the Pew Foundation suggesting that partisanship is at historical highs. I want to argue that the hyper-general content of documents like this platform indicate that at least one cause of the intensity of said partisanship is the relative emptiness of political discourse at the moment. Where one sets out to affirm seemingly universal precepts like “the people” and the Constitution, one also images opponents who do not share in supporting these concepts. Rather than splitting constituencies on the basis of policy differences, such imagination splits the constituencies on the basis of community membership: one is against “the people” or the Founders.[ii] Where a gap between support for say, a single payer health care bill or a market oriented solution might be bridged, the gap between individuals who consider themselves part of a community and those who constitutively are not part of the community is much more difficult to traverse. This is double true in the case where one confirms one’s membership of the “in” group by imagining that those who are outside of said group (or nation) do not share ways of living or thinking with those who are included. To build a public around empty concepts such as “common sense” or “the people” still exiles those who do not share these beliefs but marks that exile as a natural outcome of the two populations being different rather than a product of rhetoric and identification.

In sum, while party platforms might be thought of as risk free statements of basic philosophies, they are worth examining precisely because they attempt to pen these basics. And where one finds a document such as the 2012 Republican platform, which is laden with platitudes, ideals, and concepts rather than concretizable policy goals, one also finds evidence of a political party in the midst of a crisis. When a document has to first start by reaffirming that those reading it are committed to the taken for granted parts of national belonging, the authors of that document see that there maybe a long way to go before stating completely a political vision for achieving what are, almost definitionally, empty ideals. The document affirms to an audience primarily that they exist, and does not tether this existence to a set of realizable political goals. What this implies is that the mission of politics is precisely coincident with the identities of the actors hailed by the platform. If one sees in contemporary conservative populism a kind of positive feedback loop wherein people participate in politics to confirm that they matter, documents like this may play a role in the inwardly focused and repetitive political demands emerging from the Right: less taxes, less government, more Constitution.

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[i] The document is not content free, I want to mention. The section addressing energy policy makes some noise about ending the Environmental Protection Agency’s “war on coal” and smoothing the runway for Keystone XL along with opening more federal lands and waters for drilling and resource exploration. Environmental policy compared to economics and social policy is not generally a huge driver of turnout, and thus might stick out as an area where more substantive policy proposals might be enunciated.

[ii] Clearly I should note that there are many who are quite skeptical of the Constitution and “the people.” These tend to be people who produce and subscribe to theories that are heavily skeptical of the American nation on the basis of its creation through structural violence. There is merit to this. I do not think Republicans are targeting such voters.

A Reading of Some of Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black, Contra/Pro Giorgio Agamben

This blog post is the first in a series of posts examining Frank Wilderson’s Red, White, and Black. The next essay in this series will hopefully address his reading of Jacques Lacan that he undertakes early in the book. This reading is heavily indebted to readings and conversations with others, not to mention debate performances I have witnessed. Special acknowledgments go to Amber Kelsie, Damiyr Davis, Ben Crossan, Shanara Reid-Brinkley, Syndey Pasquinelli, David Herman, Terrell Taylor, and many, many others.

Frank Wilderson opens the first chapter of his study in racism Red, White, and Black: The Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema at what seems to be a common starting point for many academics, especially those who tend to locate their scholarly conversations in houses that go by various names like “post-structuralism” or the now mostly out of vogue “postmodernism:” the Holocaust. Alighting on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose ruminations on the Muselmann serve as a kind of stand in for Western philosophy’s fixation on the intelligibility of the event of the Holocaust if not, as Wilderson will claim, the intelligibility of the suffering that renders it as a thinkable event.  This blog post will interrogate Wilderson’s use of Agamben as a point of departure and argue that contemporary dynamics of international violence suggest a reading of affinity between the two.[1]

            Starting at the Holocaust as a point of academic reference enables Wilderson to undermine it by pointing to the ways in which its historical uniqueness should be regarded not as a taken for granted fact but instead as a political status that serves to write over or perhaps frame out other modalities of suffering, especially in the Middle Passage of American slavery and Native American genocide.[2] Why, Wilderson asks, are scholars comfortable with situating the Holocaust as the central tragedy of Western existence when the dynamics at play in Europe from 1939-1945—in which sentient beings were stripped of their humanity, physically segregated, systematically used for labor, and gratuitously murdered for no reason—have been witnessed not only elsewhere but also chronologically earlier? Scholarly uptake of this particular Eurocentrism effects a positioning of “the German/Jewish relation as the sine qua non of structural antagonism, thus allowing political philosophy to attribute ontological—and not just social—significance to the Jewish Holocaust.”[3]

            To further unsettle this fixation, Wilderson turns to the work of black theorist/insurrectionist Frantz Fanon, drawing on his description of the Holocaust as a “little family quarrel” to suggest that the Holocaust was a moment when Jewish bodies occupied a position of “Blackness and Redness” rather than heralding the dawning of some new, ontological regime of life management. Key to this analysis is Fanon’s distinction between social and structural versions of violence, which Wilderson frames as the difference between “oppression” and “suffering.” The Black “suffers” while the Jew is “oppressed,” suggesting that suffering functions ontologically to structure reality while oppression is a contingent state of violation that may be recognized and interrupted by actors in civil society. To give one example, today nostalgia reigns supreme for the America of “The Greatest Generation” that is said to have liberated the concentration camps and defeated fascism. Evidence for this is easy enough to find in the rhetorical archive of presidential address given in the conduct of the war on terror, where we find analogies throughout that conflate Al Qaeda with Hitler and robust American citizens with G.I.’s rolling across Western Europe.[4] For Wilderson, the fact that we can mark a starting and stopping point of the Holocaust suggests its social rather than ontological character: no such judgment is yet warranted regarding the treatment of the Black body.

            The language of positionality in Wilderson’s reading is a point of interest. How can the Jew, for example, occupy the position of the Black and remain the Jew? As Wilderson argues, “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews, Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks.”[5] The structure of his argument indicates that during the Holocaust Jewish people did occupy the same position of abjection, violation, and invisibility that Blacks occupy. No doubt Wilderson’s argument regarding positionality serves as a strong rebuttal to critiques, on both left and right, of typical “identity politics” characteristic of especially the “culture wars” of the 1990’s in America. Multiculturalism, political designs scripted for inclusion, affirmative action, and demands for “positive” representation of Blacks in media and cinema: this conglomeration of social policies all mistake the absence of robust Black participation in civil society to signal a contingent failure of the political regime of liberalism rather than a deeper, structural issue with how a regime of political life actually demands a negation of the sentience of some beings so that others might live in society as what Aristotle called politikon zoon, political life.[6]

            Indeed, my reference to Aristotle is no accident given how operative definitions of life circumscribe the political economy of argument circulation. In the same book (The Politics) where he gives this definition of life he also offers a philosophical justification for slavery, in holding that there are simply some beings that are suited to rule and there are other beings that are suited to being ruled. Wilderson would hold that this line of reasoning has yet to be interrupted in the West, and the insistence by many on marking moments of “liberation” like the Civil War, legislation for Civil Rights, and victories in war elides or, to say it more precisely, produces the ontological continuity of existence as a thing possessed by all but Blacks. Perhaps no better example exists in Wilderson’s book than in the introduction where he refers to James Baldwin’s failed friendship with Norman Mailer, who “wrote about ‘the terrible gap between [Norman Mailer’s] life and my own.’” Mean that “His long Paris nights with Mailer bore fruit only to the extent that Mailer was able to say  ‘Me, too” in response to Baldwin’s own stories about the depths of his experience of exclusion and abjection in a society constituted by racism.[7]

What Wilderson is suggesting is that ontological violence structures communicative exchanges so that Black arguments never enjoy the force of presumption on their side. I say Black arguments rather than “Black arguments from experience” because I hold that all argumentation is characterized by the argument from experience.  The hierarchy of arguments, from best to worst, is not decided upon by some objective external arbiter of rightness and wrongness. Rather, familiarity tethers arguments to subjects, who mistake the inertia of intelligibility for a token of “right” argumentation instead of as a mark of their own ideological affinity for the given performative argumentative practices.  Baldwin attempted to traverse the gap between his world and Mailer’s, and failed, repeatedly, because much of what he lived was simply incomprehensible to Mailer. Wilderson holds that racial antagonism structured the gulf between the two in such a way that it cannot properly be called “misunderstanding” but instead should be understood as “incommensurability.” Baldwin came to realize that he was articulating his own existence on a communicative plane that was structured in such a way that only to the extent that his life experiences could be made to conform to existing matrices of intelligibility possessed by White society would his life be recognized.

Where external authority conditions life on that life’s capacity to behave in a manner intelligible to said authority, that life cannot be said to exist except as the conditional fuel for the authority of the community which, by virtue of presumption, stands in judgment of what communicative acts or are not worthy. Civil society’s authority, embodied by those who take its existence for granted in their acts of judgment and communication to judge, comes from a double movement of, “Me too” but mostly, “Not me” that simultaneously confirms the capacity of the mass public to render judgment over the appropriateness of argumentation while at the same time consigning that which is not intelligible i.e. Black argumentation to a separate sphere.

            Wilderson’s argument has far reaching implications for those in communication studies who remain interested in rendering accounts of how deliberative practices and institutional action do or do not succeed in achieving certain goals, either thought of in terms of constituting material benchmarks through traditional metrics (legislative change, changes in legal interpretation) or in a more Between Facts and Norms sense of moving the needle in terms of expanding the repertoire of forms and practices of argumentation  that civil society is capable of recognizing as “political.” Wilderson has no compunction about aligning himself with the academic movement of what is called Afro-pessimism because in his view, the structural exclusion of the Black from society ensures that efforts at expansionary inclusion emanating from the mass public serve only to confirm the authority of that public to judge while at the same time routinely failing to address the structural conditions of exclusion. I am cheating a bit here by splitting them into two functions, actually. It is really the case that the confirmation of the mass public’s capacity to judge perpetuates the structural conditions of exclusion. Despite Wilderson’s decision to place Giorgio Agamben in his crosshairs in the opening of his book, I believe that Agamben’s account of the distinction between bare life and political life offers an elegant supplement that explains the rhetorical mechanisms for the production of the process Wilderson identifies.

            In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life Agamben outlines his case for how the dispossession of populations comes to function structurally as opposed to contingently. Working from the Aristotelian distinction between life with the capacity for political speech, political life, and life which is incapable of signifying, bare life, Agamben suggests political actors utilize a rhetoric that elevates “the good life,” that is, life which exists above the realm of pure biological existence and into the realm of shared speech, politics. Elevating political life, however, requires that political life be defined against some other version of life, and that other form of life is bare life. Political philosophy has defended Western political institutions on the basis not of their capacity to protect a Hobbesian social contract, that is, the basis to secure bare life, but instead on the basis to provide for the good life. Michel Foucault engineered this turn in thinking politics in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, where he identified emerging tendencies on the part of the government to rationalize interventions as means of enabling populations not just to live, but also to live well and in a certain way. Such rationales represent racialized thought because they discriminate between various and sundry populations to the extent that some ways of living are valued and prioritized over and above others.

            By the time he wrote State of Exception Agamben was applying his thesis to the conduct of internal politics and especially the war on terror. It should be noted that he does not think the war on terror is a unique example of the politicization of bare life, only that it is one among many available in what he says is now, following Walter Benjamin, a state of permanent exception in which populations find themselves “bare” and thus vulnerable to management, dispossession, and extermination at the hands of the sovereign. These bodies suffer the violence of sovereignty, included only to feel its force, but are otherwise excluded from participation. In this way a simple topographical distinction between inside and outside is not enough, but a threshold, “a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other.”[8]

            Let me give an example of this process. Many of George W. Bush’s speeches in the wake of September 11^th spoke of the Al Qaeda and the nations that harbored them as barbaric threats to Western civilization. At the same time that these populations were described in these terms, America continued to conduct a campaign of vigilant military attack on these nations, attacks which created and intensified numerous political and infrastructural deficiencies faced by countries which were often already struggling with developmental deficits that indexed not only the legacy of colonialism but also their position on the periphery rather than center of the global order. Existing cultural differences, especially religious and ethnic, were played up in media accounts of the condition’s facing women in nations like Afghanistan. At the same time that political rhetoric emanating from the West suggested that these nations were politically bereft and thus in need of Western military intervention, sanctions, international scorn, and that military intervention worked to verify the rhetorical account of these nations as backwards and outside of the world of Western “political” life. They were inside sovereignty only to the extent that they faced the exercise of sovereign violence but constitutively excluded in all other ways.

            So the question: would Wilderson recognize the strife between Western Europe and the populations in the East as a “family quarrel” following Fanon’s analysis of the Holocaust? Would the position of Afghanistan be contingent in his view, i.e. occupying a position of the Black but only until there comes to be a recognition of something shared between Afghanistan and the West? Would this recognition depend upon what Wilderson, building on the work of Sadiya Hartman, would call the “fungibility” of the idea of violence as applied to the black body? Those who are both geographically segregated from the West and also marked ethnically will probably not be permitted to symbolically “enter” the West anytime soon. And if the soft, permanent electronic euthanasia of drone strikes is any indicator, civil society’s capacity to perceive the bodies of those like the son of Anwar Awlaki is seriously denuded.  While some Western theorists, chief among them Agamben, are capable of ascertaining similar characteristics in the Holocaust and the ongoing war on terror, one would be hard pressed to identify this analogical mode of thinking as anything approaching dominant or ascendant, which suggests a level of permanence to the position of bare life in the war on terror as constitutively excluded.

            This example emphasizes that Wilderson and Agamben have strikingly similar accounts of suffering. Both suggest that for certain bodies the difference from other bodies is one of kind rather than degree. That is, for Wilderson the slave is ontologically distinct from the body that is included in civil society. Similarly, Agamben holds that bare life is in a position of abjection, subject to the vicissitudes of violent sovereignty by virtue of an inclusion whose only index is the body’s subjection to violence.

            But there is one important seeming distinction: while Wilderson and Agamben both render the violence as ontological in the sense that it absolutely denies the humanity and agency of those upon it is visited, Agamben reads the emptiness of sovereignty’s authority—here I would say its rhetorical basis—as a sign of hope rather than the pessimism that Wilderson suggests.  As he says in State of Exception the lack of a “substantial articulation” between violence and law, that is, the fact that the relationship is established through tautology rather than through appeal to some kind of external authority, suggests that the inability to distinguish between violence and the law is itself a resource for political action, one that could demonstrate that emptiness.[9] Wilderson on the other hand believes that the investment in authority for authority’s sake is evidence that there is no chance for the slave to exist in the world because the slave’s existence is what makes the world possible. As he says it, “No slave, no world” because of both how the physical labor of slavery makes our existing world possible and also how the symbolic figure of the slave secures, through various and sundry means, the intelligibility of civil society itself.

            Above I mark the distinction as “seeming” because I think the attitudinal difference between the two thinkers is much less than the shared explanation both give for the way in which political action sediments hierarchies to the detriment of bodies that have no access to those political worlds. Both Agamben and Wilderson indicate that the authority of civil society is generated by tautological exercises of sovereign power the ground themselves in their own assumption of authority. Agamben suggests that sovereignty anticipates its own success to close off alternative perspectives while Wilderson argues that anti-blackness works as a paradigm by rendering a constitutively impossibility arguments and actions which might testify to its own self-investment in authority. Wilderson and Agamben both outline theories of political exclusion that argue some forms of life are given priority over other forms of life, and the unintelligibility of those other forms of life is the grist for the mill of civil society and politics, respectively. Wilderson’s point regarding Agamben’s focus on the Holocaust is a necessary one, but contemporary situations of global violence also suggest that there may be a level of permanence to the state of exception that argues more for a reading of affinity between the two rather than a theorization of their opposition.

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[1] I am excited to interrogate further how Agamben is read by Jared Sexton, Achille Mbembe, and others. I have not yet had a chance to do that.

[2] Frank Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: The Structure of Antagonisms in U.S. Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press, (2010) p. 36

[3] Ibid.

[4] For more see David Noon, “Operation Enduring Anslogy” in Rhetoric & Public Affairs

[5] Wilderson, Red, White, and Black p. 38

[6] Aristotle, The Politics

[7] Wilderson 11

[8] Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, p. 23

[9] State of Exception, p. 87