By Carl Raschke
I write this blog one day before the 2008 presidential election, not
only because there was an unexpected hole in the schedule of bloggers
this fall, but because I wanted to offer these observations before the
actual electoral outcome is determined. I will steadfastly refuse to
weigh in with a political opinion on who I personally think should be
elected, mainly because as a 501(c) 3 the non-profit organization that
sponsors JCRT and this blog is forbidden from doing so. At the same
time, this election has effectively gone on for almost two years and
totally dominated the passions and public consciousness of America, and
I can say that I will personally be more than happy when it is over.
It's sort of like the two weeks I spent in Vienna this past June with a
"travel class" from my own university.
We arrived just about the day what German speakers call die Meisterschaft,
or "championship" - opened in that city. It was still going on when we
left, and on my next stop in Amsterdam, where I was planning to visit
with my son and family, who live there, it was still going on, at least
on the television to which every Dutch citizen glued their gazes in the
evening - as was the case earlier with Austrian citizens and the tens
of thousands of curiosity-seekers, beer-sotted fans, and news observers
who had crowded into Vienna to participate in some manner. Die Meisterschaft,
of course, is the European soccer bacchanalia that takes place every
four years in some fortunate, or unfortunate, city on the Continent.
Every national team plays every other national team in a protracted,
elimination contest that generates far more passion, and bad public
behavior, than one could ever generate for the Olmypics. For the first
five days watching Germans, Croats, Turks, and Portuguese paint their
faces patriotic colors, swarm and bellow chants in their native
languages like some frenzied ratpack in the city's official "fanzone"
was exciting and even amusing. After a week it became not only
tedious, but depressing. The same can be said for the election.
After the national party conventions it became painfully obvious
that the "bi-partisan" mantra of "post-partisan" politics was more
exactly the fraud that everyone hoped it was not. This election is
more partisan than it has ever been. In an age when the nation remains
wretchedly divided ideologically, regionally, and culturally, I suppose
that we should be thankful that to date it's only become a lot of nasty
name-calling and opponent-baiting. But there are troubling signs not
evidence in elections of yore, even during the close, but vicious, 2004
contest between Bush and Kerry. We no longer have "swift boaters," but
we have effigies of candidates in both parties boldly and proudly hung
in public by nooses. Calling Obama the "anti-Christ" is gaining
serious traction among some respectable preachers and fundamentalist
email chain-mailers in the Bible Belt. Even during the Clinton
impeachment hearings in the late 1990s hearings that sentiment was
never really heard. Former Clinton operative and CNN pundit James
Carville seriously predicted rioting if Obama somehow didn't make it to
the White House. Amd just four days before the election
long-forgotten, aging Sixties rad-diva Erica Jong caused a global
sensation when she told an Italian daily newspaper that "blood will run in the streets" and that a "second Civil War" was in the offing unless Obama won on Tuesday.
What is going on? The right, which seems to have co-opted much of
John McCain's message, has honed its "the Marxists are coming, the
Marxists are coming" battle cry. The left, which seems equally
paranoid and obtuse and just doesn't get the fact that somebody like
Sarah Palin can become a real political force in this country, mainly
because they've never bothered to try to understood real people, has
dusted off once again the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Even Cindy
Sheehan, who is running against Nancy Pelosi presumably to her left,
getting vandalized. Both parties have crafted their message fairly
forcefully and consistently, and both parties seem at least to agree on
a common theme - "apocalypse now".
The big and scary and complex global financial crisis of the last
seven weeks, whose etiology defies even the superficial logic of the
endless and tiresome stump speeches, has of course contributed to the
current mood of anxiety bordering on confusion bordering on panic
bordering on a sense of impending disaster. Unfortunately, it's safe
to say that whoever wins at this point - and all the polls and
pseudo-polls indicate it's going to be relatively close - could easily
appear to the legions of l'autre as the occasion for apocalypse.
That's how these sorts of things get started. At this point I'm not
making any predictions, except it's safe to say that the mood out
there, whatever demographic slice you slice and dice, is downright
ugly.
The key indicator is not what McCain or Obama has actually promised,
or threatened, to do, whether in fact or according to some trance-like
delusion, but the well-documented fact that the smallest portion of the
population since polls stated to be taken is grievously unhappy with
"the direction of the country." If all those unhappy people were
somehow a majority of the like-minded, it would be one thing. But
they're all unhappy about a lot of different things, the most important
of which is the economy, and their " rage", as some commentators have
fallen into the habit of calling it, is vectored in mutually
contradictory directions. This election could end up like the two
offended pistol duelers who turn and pull the trigger at exactly at the
same time and both collapse dead at once. The "blood" in the street in
this case could be everybody's.
I hope I'm wrong. We'll know soon. But what's more important than
the actual vote count on Tuesday is some recognition of what's really
at stake here. As Michael Mandel argues in the latest issue of Business Week,
the problem is not really a "crisis of confidence" in either the
politicians or the world financial system. It's the global economic
system which has been evolving willy-nilly in the last two decades and
has reached an inevitable and logical point of "crisis," as Karl Marx -
not to be confused with most of today's idiot savant "cultural
Marxists" - would himself have foreseen. The crisis has evolved since
formerly Marxist countries began after the collapse of the Soviet Union
- actually in China after the death of Mao - to accumulate "capital" by
adopting a sophisticated and somewhat atavistic strategy of
mercantilism while the "capitalist" West in general, and America in
particular, shed any pretense at all of accumulating "capital" through
negative savings, bankrupting military adventures, and an orgy of
low-interest, credit-crazed consumerism.
If in Marx's definition, a capitalist is the one who hogs all the
surplus value, it ain't even America's Fortune 500 any longer. It's
the guys who own all the currency reserves, and the honor right now
goes to those verry guys who just a generation ago were waving Mao's
little red books. I mean, of course, the Chinese. In other words, the
former Marxists are aufgehoben as capitalists, and the former
capitalists are aufegehoben as Marxists, even George Bush to a minor
extent, as we say in the case of the Great Bank Bailout otherwise known
as the Great Global Train Robbery.
Before our postmodernist sensibilities lurch too far toward pulling
a Lazarus on Marx and Engels in light of the present new world
disorder, it might be useful to sober up on a little post-colonialist
theory which can serve as a damper for any
post-Derridean, neo-Jamesonian "revolutionary" ardor, as
Lacan functioned not too many years ago for the fantasy of the
triumphal Hegelian/Sartrean subject. Post-colonial theory, which our
au courant philosophers and our "theologians" rarely read these days,
if they read it at all, has served to interrogate and dislocate every
possible ground for a reinscription of a Western politics - yes, even a
"radical" and "progressive" politics - in the roiling discursivity of
the global today. After Said's long and relatively "Pyrrhic"
battle using Foucault's weapons of mass theoretical destruction against
the empire of "Orientalism"/foundationalism in the Euro-American
academy, the empire struck back with its own messianic politics of
democracy, the "democracy to come", or Zizek's abstracted and
contentless socialism. Again, we hear the cry from deep within the
rhizomic twinings of the trans-Atlantic ivy: Babylon has fallen, we are
ready and equipped now to save them.
The gist of post-colonialism, especially in light of the righteous
critiques of Said himself, is that no "dialectical" god can save us.
We cannot revive Marx, because we cannot revive the dialectic. The end
of Bush is not the end of history. We are all unrepentant prisoners of
our "white mythologies." Still many years after the "overcoming" and
incineration of metaphysics, We have not recognized our own - in Homi
Bhaba's language - our own "hybridity," our fragile confused
subject-positions as Westerners who are not inextricably intermeshed
with the ephemeral aggregrates of representation produced by global
desiring machines and coded cross-cultural semiotic flows.
We are no different than the once colonized. We are "mimic men," as
the post-colonialist word of discursive critique goes. We are "inside"
and "outside" simultaneously without a sense of priority, let alone
hegemony, except that now we are mimicking them as much as they mimic
us. That is the underlying "deep politics" and higher consciousness of
what we call "globalization." Our god, yes, even the Hegelian god, is
unable to save, because it is now thoroughly relativized and
polytheized. That is what it means to be "post" in the postmodern
era. All "change" that takes place within the Western subject-position
is not change at all, unless it asks the question of the other and no
longer privileges its own hybridity over other hybridities.
The problem of theory in the age of globalization, as these sorts
of theorists remind us, is where we speak from. The colonial, or
neo-colonial subject-position, while recognizing its own radical
subjecthood after having constituted and facilitated a technology of
self-formation for the oppressed and colonized autre, does not
acknowledge its own fragmented voice, its own inability even amid its
contempt for all ontologies of power to force a global dialectic where
"liberation" can take place as a universal moment. It does not know yet
that even its messianism of the emancipated has to be negotiated,
comparativized, discharged into the stream of sign-passages. It is too
proud to say casually as it is said in all German conversation,
particularly when the narrative of messianic self-delusion has run its
course - mir ist egal.
It was Gayatri Spivak, of course, who in the wake of Said's
devastating deconstrual of the Orientalist position among the Western
progressive intelligentsia unconvered the real logic of the
post-colonial, and for that matter the post-Western, itself when she
asked for the first time a quarter century ago if the "subaltern"
could speak. The very notion of the sub-altern, the Derridean
supplement of the liberated "self-consciousness" of the decolonized -
e.g., the dalit - threatened to bring down the entire architecture
of the politics of liberation. It was the effacement that we term the
subaltern at the margins of the textuality of the universal
quest for human liberation that called into radical question the
Western dialectic of the immanent messianic, the avenir that the dialectic itself was about to become a maintenant.
At least for those fatally discouraged by the disaster of neo-con
world messianism we seem to be at such a moment. But for those
"left behind" in the religious sense, who see the global unwinding and
simultaneous transformation of the American economy and all its
emerging forms of "faith-based" subject-positions, as an absolute
exisential threat to American "values," and for those who have
fatefully mistaken the collapse of the neo-liberal dream itself as the
fearsome occasion for the new "rough beast" now slouching toward
Washington, it is a similar moment. The next twenty-four hours are
anticipated as an apocalypse now. But these apocalyptic broodings and
nightmares, which we have never quite experienced before in a liberal
democracy, are more the stuff of our own unrecognized and viral
hybrditization of internal discontinuities.
Is there really a "left" and a "right" clashing with almost equal
ideological ground masses like impassioned armies of the night? Or has
American politics simply become a densification of a vast tapestry of
demographic and ideological "subalterns" that are now clamoring to
speak, but have been totalized amid the apocalyptic rhetoric of fear
and loathing. The Wall Street Journal columnist who comes out for
Obama, or the former Reagan-cum-Hillary Democrat who votes Republican
because of a perceived "sexism" on the first truly hybridized and
globalized subject-candidate! What's the matter with Kansas, since it
votes values, not economic interest? It's the double-consciousness and
the double-loyalty, stupid!
We are all Americans, but we are all globalized and "post-colonized"
hybrid identities that have been absorbed and cast out for centuries by
the dialectics of identification that shuttles infinitely between
inclusion and exclusion. But identity theory also includes its own
fatal "revenge theory," as the indicative presence of the subaltern
impresses on. When the subaltern speaks, the game becomes confusing.
Who now is the "elite"? Those who speak as champions of the excluded,
the so-called "vanguard"? Or are they the new colonialsts themselves ?
Post-colonial theory is constantly identifying and singularizing both
previously unacknowledged colonialists - perhaps, we might better say,
colonialists who control the resources of language, the authentic
elites - and undetected subalterns.
The subalterns are speaking on both sides in this election. Whether
we are talking about "African Americans who long resisted totally
hitching their political identities to someone who might not be "black
enough" (i.e., who embodied in a different way than they were used to
the meaning of being an "African-American" wherein hybrid ethnicity
trumped the essentialism of race) or to "hockey moms" who want to be
spoken of "women" not in the way elite women are used to speaking of
women, where being a subaltern is really about discerning the old forms
of self-representation in terms of class (you know, "the middle class")
over the once fashionable rhetorical identities of race and gender, we
are witnessing the failure of even the most sophisticated totalization
of all our political visions that would make Hegel not only turn over
in his grave, but would exhume him and scatter his remains.
There is the famous Sufi story about the man who was once blind and
finally could see, and who witnessed his first sunrise. He turned to
his guide and asked in horror, "is it the end of the world?" "No",
came back the reply, "it is the beginning of new day."
New days are often born, however, in moments of clouds and thunder.
But tomorrow may not really be apocalypse now. Welcome to the desert
of the real. Welcome to the post-Hegelian. Welcome to the global.
Carl Raschke is Professor of Religious Studies at the University
of Denver and senior editor for the JCRT. He is the author of many
books, including his most recent one GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008).
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