There was a pretty harsh piece on Obama in the Times yesterday. I remember when Chris Matthews was all, “Where's my shining city on a hill?” about his inauguration speech, which I found sober to match the times. The NYT piece goes all the way back to that and accuses Obama of a lack of leadership. Since the piece is about style I thought I'd weigh on style today.
By “bad leadership” is meant, not giving speeches like that “shining city on a hill” one that Reagan sort of borrowed. Well, passing the most meaningful healthcare reform ever was good enough for me. And in any case, after eight years of Dubya, “adequate” was going to be just fine, thank you very much.
Of course the writer also castigates Obama for the healthcare thing. He shouldn't have done it at all, he argues. He is a political science prof. from Emory and he's thinking about the whole thing as political theater. Here in the world I have kids who need health care when they leave home. Organizing for America were polled as to what they thought the number one issue was, and overwhelmingly people said health care. It was a collective decision.
Which brings me on to Obama's decision making style, the way Maureen Dowd (amazingly) accuses him of being too feminine, like listening to people and the dreaded “leading from behind” thing. As a certain kind of Tibetan Buddhist I'm a big big fan of Taoism. And Obama exemplifies the yin style.
Now America is a yang country. It just is. It could without doubt use a little yin. I'm quite happy with that. In fact, that's one reason why I voted for him in the first place. Call me weird.
Yin people make you think. They infuriate yang people (another plus as far as I'm concerned!) and they force you to be conscious. They look like they're doing nothing from a super yang point of view. You can keep your glorious bombast and pomp and circumstance.
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The article, or at least it's first half seemed to be, 'why won't Obama tell us a nice bedtime story?' Whenever I hear desperate attempts to reassert the power of narrative (the fable that the fable is able), I reach for my Jean-Luc Nancy: "Myth Interrupted."
CCTW, that's a great comment--but I can't post it yet because when I follow your link, it's not easy to find your full name. You can append it to the comment if you like.
Remember Pyrrhus? Another Yin victory like this and we're done for!
Obama is telling us a nice bedtime story. That the Tea Party is alone in wrecking America ("Heckuva job, Tea Party!"), and not the increasingly incoherent Democrat compact with capital and where it's dragging everyone. That a lack of moderation in politics is wrecking America, as opposed to a one-way polarization that can only be countered via negative polarity, not some 'wised-up' deal-breaking. That America is a yang country with a mismatched yin leader, when the US is, if anything, a "yin" democracy to a "yang" system of property relations, whoever is the leader, a "whoever" Obama - as the first Black President - proves more than any President before him. If anything, the parties represent not yin and yang bt the yin and yang of the yang, with Obama the yang of the yin, the non-negotiating compromiser, the man who refuses never to stop giving way to "prudence". This is passive-aggressive "leadership" of the highest order: getting what it wants (the renovated maintenance of the status quo) by forcing its opponents to do most of the work fo it, then, through holding off the "worst" via some compromising motions, (a worst which keeps getting worse, as the Right moves further rightward, in response to the possibilities opened by the shifting spectrum), passing itself as still fundamentally an opponent, either principled but weak-willed, or somehow strategic in a way we mere plebs cannot know, playing "the long game": in both cases, as if it were not getting its way with things like the deal-debt but, rather, bravely holding out, through unpopular decisions, against a much worse reality it managed, barely (always barely), to negate. And, like most "smart players" of this sort, also constantly being outplayed by the dirty-dealing axiomatic to its own game. Thus, the credit downgrade occurs, despite the fact the debt limit was raised, because the credit agencies smell blood in the water and, for them, there's still a desperate need to ensure that government slashes away that private credit debt it absorbed and doesn't dispossess the bailed-out rentiers, so austerity has to stay on the agenda. I don't quite understand, Tim, why it is, exactly, that you're so ready to give credit to the analytic skills of the President over "the Left"? Or, to put it more precisely, authority over agitation? At bare least, it doesn't sound much like anarchism to me.
Perhaps I'm wrong but I feel this has a lot to do with Latour - who is as brilliant a sociologist of ideas as he is a highly tendentious and sneaky anti-communist. The interesting sociological premise in Latour is outlined by Graham, with his usual incisive eloquence, in his post riffing on Latour the other day:
"In short, the number of new beliefs we must hurry to acquire by discovering new and unexpected elements of the cosmos vastly outstrips the handful of fetishes and saints and rituals that one feels a need to spit upon while walking by. At the very least, there is a huge quantitative disparity here, and it is my view that intellectual method and attitude ought to reflect this disparity when arranging its priorities."
The turn to "debunking" - or "bundle theory", as per Graham's post on Hume from a few days back - is a philosophical turn in thought I suspect he (influenced by Latour) extends to the politics of "critique", seeing the change as mutually constitutive and reinforcing. But here we come to the tendentious aspect. The sociological insistence that debunking on the Left takes place in "huge quantitative disparity" (thus, inducing Left cynicism) undoes an orientation of Leftist emancipatory critique as originally and from the first the debunking of the ideologies of this debunking: it has always been the Leftist - and especially the communist - move not to indulge in mere "anti-fetishism" but to disperse the fetish of anti-fetishism that obtains in the 'disenchantment' of the world by reason: the fetish of anti-fetishism is Left-wing thought's philosophical object of critique. That anti-fetishism isn't is a long given in Leftist emancipatory thought and precisely how it can be emancipatory: it's exactly what Marx means when he talks about capitalist modernity as melting all solids into air: this is not a credulous statement but a diagnostic of the fetish of capitalist modernity's anti-fetishism. Latour's "factishes" in that sense are the ultimate fetishes in that they claim to have forsworn the anti-fetishitic (because they've forsworn modernity) only to subtract the ontological content of a belief in the reality of fetishes.
The test here is the fact that if factishes were truly not anti-fetishictic in the last instant, if they were free to respect and enter into the logic of the fetish as possessive of autonomous ontological content, if they partook of the mentality of the initiated so as to create rather than merely critique, then there'd be no need to try and save all fetishes by giving them the status of fact-likeness, since facts themselves should rightfully be subject, in the mentality of the initiated, to destruction. Is this not exactly what defines emancipatory politics in the key sense? The real instantiation of a freedom from the tyranny of facts, whether of belief or of reality? Emancipatory politics is unashamedly interested in destroying certain things because it understands those things themselves as inducing the quantitative disparities in which "the number of new beliefs we must hurry to acquire by discovering new and unexpected elements of the cosmos" does not vastly outstrip "the handful of fetishes and saints and rituals that one feels a need to spit upon while walking by". Why science can so rapidly produce such a vast amount of new "beliefs" is because the great outdoors it encounters mandates the new beliefs that attend each new object's discovery as something actually, if darkly, existent. In that sense, oddly, science is almost like imagination, which is also a kind of great outdoors for the production of new beliefs, though in the "non-existent" or the "yet-to-be-existent". To argue that philosophy should follow more in the steps of this angle of fiction and science - perhaps so as to modulate the two of them in its own way - is a powerful argument and removes philosophy from the precincts of both science (in its imagineering) and fiction (in its analytics of truth). On this much, I follow Latour. But an appreciation of the historicity of philosophy - into which category falls political philosophy - is what insists on the refusal of the Ptolemyization of new beliefs, or their subsumption, via elaborate repression, obfuscation and ornamentation, into the old theories that philosophy and science so often indulge in. The push toward critique in both politics and in philosophy is, in that dual sense, twinned but not the same, insofar as political philosophy is a subset of philosophy, often engaged in the critique of obscurantism within reason that refuses the newness of belief. On the other hand, philosophy will not exit critique - if nothing else, it will critique the critiquers - unless it comprehends that fetishes are really obstructions on the possibility of making new beliefs, that "the preservation of all facts" is both political and not the goal of philosophy, no more than it is the goal of science. This last is especially important because it factors directly into the "beautiful soulism" of refusing to end things, the faux-pluralism of the zoological protectorate of all things, which is also another version of a vision of living in "the best of all possible worlds", a bubble-dome of being in which the smallest and most conservative (in its double sense) seem like a kind of making, rather than the most disastrous capitulation to the slow violence of the forces of arbitrary and - in our era - capital-accumulative dispossession, extinction and value-destruction.
David Rylance
Slatted Light--please include your full name (new blog comment policy)
Hi Timothy,
Westen's actually a psychology professor at Emory, which I think is interesting. In fact, his strength is in providing a psychological theory of the power of narrative and political beliefs. As others have pointed out, sometimes his political science leaves a bit to be desired. (For instance, I thought it was interesting that he had to retract a point he made in the list of Obama's turning against liberals the claim that "millions of Mexican immigrants had been deported... greater than any president in history" since the figure was closer to 800,000 and the second claim was false --- and, I might add, these were specifically targeted for their criminal activity.)
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