I hear from friends about how the Obama cabinet picks have got them depressed. I keep wondering what all the progressives were expecting. For once and for all, can we say that Obama is no radical, has no radical past, and has never made promises that tightly align with a leftist agenda? Even his most progressive positions, for example on nuclear disarmament, climate change initiatives, and health care, are mostly couched in pragmatic terms, with decorative flourishes here and there appealing to the liberal ethic ('I am my brother's keeper,' he kept saying early in the campaign).
Then there's the Rick Warren thing. When it comes to his thinking on gays and lesbians, this guy is warped. Of course, yes, progressives can all agree on that. But this warped guy also happens to be the only evangelical figure with a national profile putting a liberal-leaning economic and environmental agenda out front. Partly because of that, he's reaching tens of millions, including many of the younger evangelicals.
A couple things to say. One is that Rick Warren is the perfect protection for Obama's right flank. Obama will be attacked viciously by the Republican machine–we've already seen that from the way the RNC licked its chops in the opening days of Blago's scandal. How to deflect attacks from the right while pushing through the biggest government economic intervention in seventy years? Yep. By bringing in Warren, who's universally granted serious evangelical cred, and putting him in a key slot as a buffer.
Is he sacrificing the gays in the process? Well, yes. But far from taking it as a slap on the LGBT face, I prefer to look at optimistically. It is time to admit, and even celebrate, the fact that out of all the areas of progressive struggle, and I'm talking about labor, environment, anti-war, and everything else that constitutes a broadly conceived left agenda, the only area in which gains were made during the W regime has been in LGBT politics. In fact, I would go as far as arguing that the tipping point in mainstream visibility, familiarty, and acceptance of gays and lesbians pretty much coincided with the W regime. Let's put it this way: even W and his reactionary base couldn't stem the tide of our society becoming increasingly gay friendly, year by year.
If there is any group or part of the progressive agenda that can absorb some regression (in the form of public homophobia as represented by Warren at the inauguration) without breaking, it is the LGBT constituency. I think the reality is, gay marriage gaining widespread legitimacy is only a matter of time, everyone seems to know, both those fighting for and against it, and Rick Warren be damned. The right has lost the culture wars. That means now is the moment to further isolate the Republican base, and bringing Warren into Obama's orbit, no matter how peripheral, serves this function. The older, absolutely unchanging, largely Southern evangelicals can and should now be cornered as truly fringe. Warren, for his part, needs to be put under the magnifying glass of the media, the intelligentsia, and the activists. He will not come out of this clean, from either the right or the left.
And this is the reason to love Obama–no matter his ideological moderation, the man is a political tactician like we haven't seen in a long time, with a taste for complex moves and re-writing symbols. Just when you think he's playing it safe, he drops big question marks. Rather than get worked up about the rightness or wrongness of these moves, we of the left/progressive base need to see them as openings. Now we have the opening to expose Warren, and counter with even greater insistences.
My old friend Mario posted this link on Facebook to Jeff Frankels' blog. He gives us his simplified graphic representation of the global economic crisis. For a single diagram, it is a pretty helpful thing to look over.
What could have been included is a box for 'socio-cultural factors,' meaning, the changing values that govern behavior as citizen and as consumer. Because I don't believe it is a given that lowering credit standards automatically results in more home sales. More generally, I've never accepted that there is any such thing as 'rational' behavior on the part of consumers. If there was, then where would that leave the ad agencies? And wasn't there a time way back when most Americans mistrusted lending practices of any kind, and preferred to buy property in either cash or a very limited number of installments? Americans had to be taught to borrow.
I think the lack of attention given to cultural factors among economists is important to note because it seems to me that there is, hidden among all the economics lessons granted by this latest and greatest crisis of capitalism, a
Lauren Berlant also commented on the buzz kill response to the Obama victory from parts of the Left, Judith Butler's text among them. Cross posted with permission.
She says:
Dear Friends, Please do not allow your political optimism about Obama’s election to make you stupid! Here’s how to stay sharp and smart…
If mainstream politics significantly shapes your mood, this week has been a blow to normalcy. For the moment, Obama is the President of our emotional Infrastructure as well as the economic and physical ones. As a result, if you’re like me, you have been inundated by condescending and vitalizing exhortations not to become naive or stupid where political happiness also is.
This bolus of anxiety expresses the fear that political happiness will lead to a flatlined complacent brain, diminished political judgment, and the revelation of your bad taste. The claim that anxiety makes you smart makes me laugh. But solidaristically, not condescendingly.
We’ve all been in bad love affairs before, where our attachments made us stupid. Once you attach to an object, after all, you become aware that the object isn’t in your control. Suddenly the prospect of having the object and losing the object, of getting more and less than you want from it, rule you. You become aware that the intensity of your attachment is not unconditional, even as you demand unconditional fidelity from the other person. When the pulses that brought you to the person subside you ask, “What did I want when I wanted that?” Then your affect and intelligence shift around, trying to make new sense of things. If the object is a political figure, perhaps you start circulating screeds to your friends, reminding them not to be stupid where there is desire.
But these efforts to manage the anxiety of political attachment and of optimism about it are actually oversimple about how (political) emotion can work. I don’t have the space here to make the long argument. Here’s a bit of it. Attachments are intrinsically optimistic. The event of attachment does not make us stupid but releases a slew of smart but often overwhelming thoughts about how complicated attachment is.
We are ambivalent about what we want, for lots of reasons. Attachment reveals our dependency on something, our need for reciprocity and recognition, and the place of fantasy in managing life. One strategy of managing this is sometimes to pretend that our feelings aren’t mixed. Then when the world disappoints us we can say that we were true while the other was false. Another way to manage this is to claim that we are complex while the other people are disappointing, limited, and deserving of critique and complaint. But presuming a self-interested distinction between complexity and simplicity where attachment is concerned itself performs a fantasy that there are unmixed feelings and that people are ever simple. Even your grandmother wasn’t that simple, trust me. But you knew that. You just wanted someone to be simple so that you could reliably rest in proximity to the scene of the love.
So can we think about political emotion differently, and be less afraid of optimism? The process of managing the ambivalent feelings that come from active political commitment is fundamentally optimistic, and no one needs to be protected against that. Optimism is what keeps you in the scene as it veers between being joyful, stressful, and tedious. Indeed, David Graeber argues that solidarity amounts to a comic commitment to practicing expressing political desire and finding pleasure and sustenance in disagreement, along with all the other political emotions (such as, boredom, aversion, outrage, betrayal). Not that there’s anything wrong with a rigorous fear of one’s own stupidity–after all, fear can be a teacher of sorts. But let’s not equate a sense of happiness with shallowness and emotional darkness with truth and profundity.
Oh yes, about Obama, the neoliberal, gay-marriage compromised, “market guy…” Here’s what makes me politically happy about the event of Obama. He is the first mainstream politician in decades who loves the political process. He does not confuse “Washington” with politics. His organization’s practice of training other organizers demonstrates his commitment to producing skills for political world-building beyond his campaign.
In this way the event of Obama has already massively advanced the skills for democracy in the United States. In other ways he seems committed to constraining and even undermining what that might entail concretely. Protesting and appreciating, though, are some of what we do to maintain the optimism of any attachment. They keep you bound to the (political) scene, to the cognitive and affective difficulties of remaining critically present to desire.
A few weeks ago my friend Kay, who moved to Montreal not long ago, came back to Chicago for a short visit. We managed to meet up for an evening. She brought for me an exhibition catalogue for a show in the McGill library called
The show consisted of works selected out of the collection of Marc Raboy, a professor at McGill, and which he donated to their library. The catalog is bilingual, of course, and laid out in an upside-down mirror image design. It is too bad that all the images are presented twice. There could have been twelve different reproductions instead of just six, twice. Still, all are images of publications I had never heard of.
The catalogue text makes mention of both the still-operational Black Rose Books and the American magazine, Scanlan's Monthly. Neither had I ever heard the story of how editor Warren Hinkle couldn't get an American company to print Scanlan's in 1970 for reasons of both political content (too radical!) and offending the unions (which dominated the printing trade then). He finally found a willing shop in St. Jean, Quebec.
A few weeks ago Mark Rigney invited me to post a text to his blog as a guest writer. Why not. Mark is working to bring some small readerships together, and I think it's a good experiment. Mark Fogal, an economics policy guy working in Saint Louis, contributed the first one, about Keynes and new public works programs. Mine is the second, about Jennifer Montgomery's film Transitional Objects, and my, um, transitional object. Have a read here.
While you're there be sure to check out Mister Rigney's page on beer can collecting. Dontcha remember in the Seventies, when it seemed like every boy and his dad had a beer can collection going? At least in Saginaw, Michigan, it seemed to be that way. Remember how they lined the basement walls?
What is it about blogs that makes personal bloggers like me feel the need to explain where I've been, or what I've been doing, that has kept me from posting? Maybe, this time, it is because one of the reasons for not posting is so lame: For the last two weeks I've been losing blog time to the incredible vacuum that is Facebook. But I think my site-time has reached a new equilibrium. Now, I just gotta get around to linking the blog to the FB, both of which, let it be said, Balz bullied me into. Okay, willingly...I guess.
Today I ran into South Side artist Dan Peterman. I hadn't seen him since before the election. We shared a moment marveling at the economical symbolic elegance of Obama's appointment yesterday of Gen. Shinseki to head Veterans Affairs. This post by James Fallows, quoted in full below, says it well.
The thing Fallows doesn't talk about is the way in which this action by Obama, played out in the conventional process of appointing his cabinet, strategically wrests the national memory and historical narrative away from the conservatives, probably for good. And Obama's awareness of historical narrative is itself notable for its aggression. He is not waiting around to claim, correct, and disseminate the new and what will be a forever dominant narrative. Shenseki the Repudiation is not being appointed half way through the first term, he is being installed before the inauguration! By contrast, the battles over memory and narrative regarding the war in Vietnam continue to this day. I see this quashing of the contestation as part of Obama's 'no drama' posture; conflict, controversy, multiple claims, and the passage of time with unresolved national memory creating multiple specialized constituencies are all great for Hollywood, but not for governing.
James Fallows:
Barack Obama is all about bipartisanship, conciliation, binding up wounds, and so forth. Great! If only more presidents saw things that way.
But in his
(reported)choice of Eric Shinseki as Secretary of Veterans Affairs, there is also an extremely refined aspect of sticking in the shiv.Whenever he talks about this selection, Obama (plus his lieutenants) can describe it completely, sufficiently, and strictly in the most bipartisan high-road terms. They have selected a wounded combat veteran; a proven military leader and manager; a model of personal dignity and nonpartisan probity: an unimpeachable choice. Symbolic elements? If people want them, they can work with Shinseki's status as (to my recollection at the moment) the first Asian-American in a military-related cabinet position, not to mention a Japanese-American honored for lifelong military service on Pearl Harbor Day.
As for the other symbolic element -- that Obama is elevating the man who was right, when Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al were so catastrophically wrong -- that is something that neither Obama nor anyone around him need say out loud, ever. The nomination is like a hyper-precision missile, or what is known in politics as a "dog whistle." The people for whom this is a complete slap in the face don't need to be told that. They know -- and know that others know it too. So do the people for whom it is vindication. And all without Obama descending for one second from his bring-us-together higher plane.
The artistry here is remarkable. Along with the inspired nature of this choice.
Speaking of posters, the show Signs of Change, organized by Josh MacPhee and Dara Greenwald, just closed. Eric Triantafillou wrote a thoughtful review of the show here.
Not sure why I'm posting this now, since these two men died a while ago. But I think remembrances and appreciations should be good anytime, not just in the immediate shadow of death.
Free Speech Movement vet Michael Rossman passed back in the spring. A friend of mine knew him through one of his sons. It was she who first told me about his incredible collection of political posters. She encouraged me to make contact, gave me his phone number and everything. Somehow, I just never did. That was a few years ago. And then a link to this video below arrived from Lincoln Cushing in an email posted to the Radical Art History List. RAHL is a service of the Radical Art Caucus, one of the College Art Association's affiliated societies.
Tonight I made some time to get lost in the new book from Temporary Services, Public Phenomena. It is, on balance, an impressive document, and an enjoyable book experience.
With this book I have my usual gripes about Temporary Services work, though. Chief among them this time around, the 'straight' style of image presentation and the direct voice in the text. For example, in the collection of photos documenting improvised methods of saving parking spaces on snowy Chicago side streets, the pics are almost all straight on. There, centered and filling the picture field, is an old chair or a couple of beams balanced on a box. Odd objects caught in the technically illegal act of saving a private space on a public street. But you'd never know about how the functional imperatives actually shape these creations because the method of photography gives no context. I want to see what else is on that street, how this pirated space relates to the parking spaces around it, how it stands in relation to the other side of the street, what kinds of junk might be found in the parallel alleyway, etc. A few distance shots would have been helpful for the reader to understand and imagine what drives these acts. In the text TS makes a joke about these temporary, soft-aesthetic barricades coming across as Arte Povera sculptures, but their photography makes it true. I know TS prefers ostensibly direct approaches in the name of accessibility, but sometimes a simplicity of documentary style renders acts grounded in concrete socio-spatial circumstances more abstract than they are, which reduces accessibility.
But don't read this commentary as a statement of disappointment! I depend on TS–my trusted colleagues and occasional collaborators–to produce work we can argue over. They deliver every time. I recommend this book. It is worth it alone for the digestable and smartly annotated list of book and web resources included at the end. As generous as ever, they turn me on to lots of things I never knew existed.
It was about three days after the election that Mary Patten forwarded a text by Judith Butler to the gochgo list. It was Uncritical Exuberance?, and I guess the story is that Butler composed it on or soon after Election Day, sent it around through her circles and from there it was passed along widely. You can read it here.
I wrote a response which was posted to eipcp, and also below. Gerald Raunig put in the work of translating it for readers of German.
A Response to Judith Butler: Working the Optimism
Judith Butler’s commentary Uncritical Exuberance? continues what the left has been doing for so long it is now almost second nature: distance itself from the power structure. Critical voices on the left are always the first to see the likelihoods of cooptation, neutralization of radical elements, assimilation of grassroots formal innovation into the institutional sphere, misreadings of a political figure as a messianic force, looming conflicts and frustrations with erstwhile allies, and all the various pitfalls of politics at the mass, national, mediated scale. But when Butler asks, to where is our wholehearted and emotionally-rewarding identification with (first) the Obama campaign and (now, maybe?) this president leading us, I cannot help but think, there is a slightly different set of questions the critical left needs to be asking right now.
Not that Butler’s questions are without merit. It is fair to ask, are leftist positions in danger of traveling in an emotional bubble, the skin stretching as some mass illusion of Obama-as-redemption takes hold, putting itself at risk of blowing up with the first great disappointment? But I think this question is rather easily answered: No. If the unity/new politics/change/hope bubble was not popped long ago by Obama’s two year-old team of brass-heavy foreign policy advisers, it has been in the mere days since the election. From within, the appointment of so many former Clinton-associated figures to the transition teams dispels illusions, and from conditions outside, the daily onslaught of announced mass layoffs and other bad economic developments does the same thing. We all know this is a president going into the job with his hands tied and choices limited, no matter his intentions. If any of his domestic initiatives—serious health care reform, big time green tech investments, national service programs, etc.—gain early traction, he will have proved himself a political Houdini. And if the unfolding conditions in Washington do not splash cold water onto the face of a hopeful electorate, then perhaps the news of fresh suicide attacks in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the last week, resulting in scores of dead, served to remind just how awful and messy these next few years will be, everywhere, always.
It is true, America felt like a new country for about a day, maybe two. Those denying reality stretched it into the weekend. But by the time Obama took the televised walk to the Oval Office with George W. Bush at his side six days after the election, any residual exhilarations had been flattened into the self-congratulatory feelings which accompany the achievement of a first: yes, there goes the First Black President-Elect. As in, there is a first time for everything. No more messiah, no more euphoria, no more fantasies of redemption. Is the mood much improved? How could it not be with the first concrete signal of the impending departure of the evil, disasterous, and violent Bush regime? Given the literally torturous tenure of George W. Bush, identifying Obama—and identifying with Obama—as the cleansing agent ready to flush the White House of its eight-year build-up of scum seems perfectly reasonable. While Butler’s theoretical analysis of this identification remains impressive for its sheer, uncompromising criticality, ie that such personal identifications which are at least partially the result of strategically produced affects perform functions essential to the machinery of fascism, it is undone by the example she herself cites. Liddy Dole, bursting with love for ‘each and every one of us,’ and a heavily favored incumbent and national Republican figure, lost the US Senate seat held only six years ago by paleo-conservative Jesse Helms to a little known Democratic state senator. This time around, the voters of North Carolina rejected all that ‘love’—by nearly ten points.
But more to the point, in this crucial moment is the primary job of critical theoreticians to poke holes in our optimism, our satisfaction, our good feelings? Even if the exuberance has run its short course and rendered the question moot, I still answer, no, not as an end in itself, or as a precondition for further political work. Butler cites voter contradictions to remind us of our reasons to remain sober. Disunity on gay marriage and the rights of Palestinians are only the two most pronounced of the disagreements internal to the grand coalition that elected Obama. There are other divides and gaps, as well. But is this news? When Butler says we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him, I say, has there been anybody, anywhere, who fully agrees with Obama on all the issues? For the hard activist left, the ‘new configuration’ may be simply this: we have finally, for one election cycle, gotten over our insistence on being right at the expense of being effective. I do not have a problem with being rewarded, for once in my lifetime at least, with the feeling that comes riding an insurgent campaign to a win on a grand scale.
Critical voices on the left do need to be heard right now, but the most pressing task is to conduct self-analyses apropos the conditions now defined by a successful national campaign that featured and relied on the essentials of a grassroots organizing model. Rather than merely reminding us of Obama’s shortcomings, or, as Butler does, of listing the left’s minimal demands that must be met to prevent a ‘dramatic and consequential disillusionment,’ the urgent responsibility right now for the critical left is to dissect this victory and map workable strategies for pushing a progressive agenda, including in intra-coalition campaigns. This involves recalling what kind of thick-skinned work brought us that moment of Election Night joy, and, just as importantly, to study how the reactionary forces are likely to respond to this administration.
If we who supported Obama all gulped a bit of the Kool-Aid, for its part the campaign squeezed the tube. The grassroots are now out, volunteers by the thousands, trained and invested—one might even say habituated—and the more the theoreticians among us attend to the strategic tasks of continued organizing, based on the actualities of activist work plus the lessons of the campaign recently won, the more the grassroots element will evolve and mature. Ideally, Obama-identified grassroots constituencies and work forces will grow to become not fully directable by Obama, and will have the potential to outlast him. Progressive dreams have always included building movements with leverage over national politicians, and here we have the chance. So even though I agree when Butler says many of us "set aside" our concerns in order to enjoy the extreme un-ambivalence of this moment, I think her worries about uncritical exuberance are, while not necessarily overstated, somewhat misplaced. When those of us who are committed to full gay rights, or Palestinian rights, or another progressive cause that goes against Democratic Party liberal orthodoxy and/or the moderation of Obama himself, begin the difficult and tedious work of lobbying our opponents/one-time coalition allies (and their constituents, on their doorsteps, in their neighborhoods, instead of on our blogs), looking for those individuals (the ‘each and every’ of grassroots organizing) who just may be convinceable but for whatever reason have fallen into the opposing camp, any lingering good feeling over the election victory will seem very distant. But if we show up and do the work, future victories for progressives in those areas will at least be in the cards. Whether, why, and how we should show up to do this work are the questions we need to be thinking through. Butler is right in identifying that space of a ‘critical politics’ as moving between illusion and cynicism. Widening that space depends on our continued political work, that is, on our continual generation of concrete contestations, the analyses of which will automatically recalibrate the emotions to a more restrained register, but would do so without turning to the crutch of measuring Obama’s imminent actions and non-actions according to the default moralism of the left. And we do the work to win—precisely so we can feel that feeling again.
