"The new black"

Tina Fey's awesome segment this week on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" probably understands what people like Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich (especially today's column) can't in all their Clinton-bashing: that Democrats want to rally around an issue, a cause, a hope of some sort, and that Clinton--unless one declares "Bitch is the new black"--just seems to ignore this want or need. She differentiates herself, that is, in precisely the wrong way from Obama: in making her campaign about experience and practicality rather than a cause or several causes, she is seen as being indifferent to the spirit of hope in ideas that the Democrats currently have. More precisely, she gives Democrats the feeling that she thinks all Democratic issues are alike in the sense that they are implementable in a policy. Democrats now want to assert--against years and years of Republican distortions--that they have intrinsic good. It is indeed the worst case of wanting to feel self-righteous: they want to feel as self-righteous as Republicans. This doesn't mean they are voting for Obama out of guilt or anything: it is just that a call for unity around an issue is seen as courageous because it assuages doubts about the rightness of the idea in the first place.  Thus the inane calls for Clinton to try and "transcend gender" as much as Obama is "transcending race"--as if this were possible or even is being done by Obama. What this statement really means is that Clinton should give us hope of making gender something that should be transcended again as much as Obama is with race. Thus Fey's comment: Clinton has to say that she stands for something larger than herself about which she can always be impractical or believe in more radically than any policy's ability to implement an openness to it. Fey is reminding us, and her, that this "something" is her gender.

In other words, Democrats want to unify around all those ideas left behind with the takeover of Reagan, not in their practical aspect at all, but precisely around the utter impracticality of what they stand for. They want to restore some force to these ideas. Obama indeed believes these ideas have force. Clinton says they are words that need to be implemented. This is the difference and the difference is crucial. Democrats don't want to doubt the correctness of their ideas anymore: they look enviously over at the self-righteousness of the Republicans.

The issue isn't whether Clinton is more right about the nature of the ideas than Obama: Obama is in fact just as practical as Clinton in most respects when it indeed comes to implementing these ideas. The issue is the dangerous direction that this means the Democratic party could be headed on: the same route as the Republicans in the 80's and 90's. Democrats are tired of being the reality-check to the Republican party. And rather than confronting the problems that the ideas of the 60's and 70's have turned into--notably, the issue of identity--they want to restore the sense of the goodness or correctness of them. Clinton sees them as problems in the sense that they have to be implemented. Obama sees them as opportunities precisely in the same sense. The latter is what the Democrats want, regardless of whether the particular constitution of the ideas ideas themselves are practical or impractical in their conception to begin with.

That said, this is only an argument against the prevailing tendency of Rich and Dowd in their commentaries to belittle Clinton via contesting her pragmatism when they are really contesting her lack of their optimism about issues like gender and race. Thus, it is also against the dangerous language of fashion that Fey employs mistakenly to give body to the optimism that she really, beneath the word "new," is wonderfully standing for. In short, it is dangerous not in how Fey uses it (the point is actually that bitch was always the same as black), but in how it might be heard. That is, it is dangerous in how it is actually a reflection of the sad reality of what would appeal to the Left: they want to be able to have ideas be able have such inherent force and rightness again that they can be turned into a fashion even (see the current status of the environmental movement in its green living, etc.).

Of course there are many more reasons to vote for Obama than just this sense of his optimism in ideas, and this is reflected at the polls or at least in people's sentiments.  And there are many more reasons to vote against or for Clinton than her stance on the belief of these issues. The point is that Clinton isn't helping herself by saying comments like this in Providence, Rhode Island, parodying Obama:

“Now I could stand up here and say, let’s get everybody together, let’s get unified the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing,” she said, to a smattering of giggles. “And everyone will know we should do the right thing, and the world will be perfect... But I have no illusions about how hard this is going to be. You are not going to wave a magic wand and make the special interests disappear.”

-"Clinton Turns from Anger to Sarcasm," from the New York Times

This is actually quite disgusting. The hardening of Hillary Clinton in this hour in her campaign against the hope in Obama's will only bring her message out less: it's utter inanity on her part. It makes the issues of the Left, which they are right in caring about (though perhaps not in the way they think about them), seem like a joke when they exceed the realm of policy and become beliefs, when, to these people, they are absolutely not.

"No, deconstruction is always on the side of the yes"

I only became aware of Derrida after his death. Ten months transpired since the foreclosure of the possibility, almost infinitely remote, but still, nevertheless, present, of the chance to meet him, to learn from him directly, to be taught by a presence and by his voice. No doubt he would have said and did say that this possibility was foreclosed long before this event (and) while he was still alive. But as I think about Derrida and the utter insanity of this and many other of his assertions--for, let's face up to it, they are insane demands he puts forth, insane in the sense that the impossibilities they seek to ground us within what, perhaps, is incompatible with any notion of a sane or coherent consciousness or existence (as well as, it should be noted, any notion of ground that is not ungrounded, abyssal, in the sense of the Ab-grund in German)--I wonder whether these months in which I missed his presence do matter, in a sense of mattering or meaning that Derrida would perhaps never accept and perhaps tirelessly resisted.

This sense is the sense of those "initiated" into Derrida: the immediate followers who claim him as their own, who represent him, both before and after this event, as "deconstructivists," "deconstructionists," or "Derridians." We all felt and feel that these followers exist, even though for fear of betraying his thought they would perhaps never call themselves these names: they saw him, "live," and learned from his presence, from his voice, even as they learned that there is no presence and no voice--indeed, that there only may be, perhaps, this presence or this voice. They were assured that they learned, because the doubt could always be alleviated--in a wholly Cartesian way--by his reality right there in front of them, in his actions and gestures and words that are now (and then) recalled as anecdotes or asides, whether in print or in their own classes or elsewhere. As initiates, as the chosen, they too mime his style, try to incorporate his teachings--those words, that presence. It manifests itself in the most superficial ways, in constructions of phrases--often relying on an unstable vocabulary, "problematized" with neologisms or borrowings from other languages left untranslated, with almost paranoid avoidance of the word "is," with quotations marks, with the endless delaying of subordinate clauses, with puns and plays and unprofitable arbitrariness, with the performance of the content of the sentence or the endless self-reflexivity--and also, sometimes, with deeper import. One gets the sense that this miming is precisely what Derrida would not want: that it is all a sham doing disservice to precisely what is said by the thinker that has granted them, supposedly, the authority to speak in his name about the non-existence of authority. One feels that they ruined the movement, that they seek only self-aggrandizement. In short, one is deeply bitter about the deconstructivists, the deconstructionists, the Derridians.

What we never sense, perhaps, is that Derrida too is one of these people. Derrida does not exist and never did exist: there were only Derridians, deconstructionivists or deconstructionists who ruined the movement even before it could be started. The exculpatory gesture of blaming the "fall" of deconstruction--or at least its popularity--on the reception of Derrida (especially in America in its literature departments) and not on Derrida himself fails to grasp perhaps the most essential sense of everything that Derrida said.

At the same time, however, one wants to hold those who do indeed use his name (even without using it)--accountable. This perhaps is the easier part to grasp concerning this sense of Derrida. One wants (in a gesture similar to psychoanalyzing Freud or blaming Marx's vehemence on the squalid conditions in which he lived) to deconstruct the deconstructionist. This is not only just a desire: it is in fact the only way in which we know we can really hold these Derridians accountable in a way that would respect the Derrida that they claim for themselves, that they fake.

One can outline, then, this double bind: one must deconstruct anyone speaking in the name of Derrida, and yet Derrida is one of these people. The close circle around him, of those who heard him, is really constituted only with versions of himself, disseminated. But, then, how to get rid of those around him who annoy us so much, and, we sense, really indeed ruin deconstruction? We seem to hit at the real challenge for our thinking here: fundamentally, we can never really separate the author from his followers, even when he is declared or even declares himself dead. At this point, things become vertiginous and we perhaps must pull back a little.

But it is here with this pulling back that we can criticize, and really accost those who speak in his name, including Derrida himself. It is precisely when they use his thought that one should oppose them: not in the name of Derrida or what he really said, but in how they are seeking to pull back from the vertigo in which they locate themselves and send us off into reflection. To be a little more precise: the faker who merely follows Derrida would always be able to be opposed or resisted precisely to the extent that they pull back towards or fall back upon one or even a few Derridas. Their readings of his texts, their use of them, their miming of his style and manner and even thought can always and in fact only usefully be criticized precisely though movement of deconstructing the one--and indeed it is here that one sees the deep novelty of deconstruction: that one senses that psychoanalyzing Freud is just superfluous but that deconstructing the deconstructionist is, precisely in its superfluity and impropriety, proper--that is, precisely not by an appeal to what Derrida said but to the construction of a reading of what they (the Derridians) do there to expose how they rely on a fixed Derrida, a Derrida of Grammatologie, or Dissemination, or Glas, of whatever. One can expose in their gestures of faith to what this one Derrida--the Derrida upon which they fall back--said, the fact that this is only what one Derrida said, what one Derrida meant, what one Derrida acted like or performed. If they are a real Derridian--and it is questionable whether Derrida himself was this--they will appreciate what has happened. This is a trick at the same time as it is the most profound understanding of what deconstruction may be about: precisely not comfy positions in universities nor a sort of motivated politics in the streets. There are too many Derridas (even, and barely) for that.

This does not mean that one should simply say that a Derridian misrepresents another, different, Derrida of another text. It means that one must enter into another double bind--perhaps the same but perhaps different: one must prove that what was said or done by this "faker" or "follower" is a misrepresentation of the plurality of Derridas precisely because there is only misrepresentation of this plurality--and not, above all, by using the mere phrase, catchword, or shorthand-name "there is only misrepresentation," or something similar, for this would merely be citing a Derridian text and excluding others. One must prove the impossible, the insane, then. And therefore be a fellow follower, a fellow faker, another one who ruins the movement. But perhaps one can do this in neologisms less or even completely other than Derrida's. This indeed is what Derrida does throughout his corpus: tirelessly, he follows himself.

Derrida, then, was (perhaps) a pose, a performance. But (or, therefore) this means that his death does not matter for me, and yet matters all the more. It isn't that I could have experienced him, heard him speak, etc. if he were alive. It is precisely that I would have only experienced a fraud. And this is exactly what matters in this time after his death.

Marx as defender of the dialectic

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx defends the Hegelian dialectic. Or rather, he defends it against the attempt to break with it that is concentrated in capitalism. He exposes this attempt as really only a dialectical redoubling that does not escape from the dialectic.

We can see this in the passage where he recasts the Hegelian master/slave relationship into the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship. The second is actually the truth of the former--that is, in less Hegelian terms, the bourgeoisie/proletariat relationship is the dialectical overcoming of the antagonism or contradiction between the master/slave relationship. Instead of exploiting the slave, the master here tries to take care of the worker so that the worker can continue to work. This allows both master and slave to work for the master's master, work itself. But what is crucial about this is that the "taking care of" here or "feeding" of the slave is only feeding the slave such that the worker's work--and not the worker himself--can continue. The emphasis is upon work abstracted from the existence of the slave that provides the work. Thus the slave sinks below the conditions that he would be under if he were wrapped up in the feudal master/slave dialectic, because the master here is not concerned with his existence--the master is "incompetent to assure the continued existence" of the slave, as Marx puts it. The slave cannot properly be a slave under capitalism. That is, it cannot be assured as to whether he will exist as a slave: his bare existence is threatened in the face of the abstract labor-power he temporarily embodies.

Thus what is going on is the attempt to dissolve the dialectic into a relationship where there will be no conflict, no dialectical conflict, between the master and the slave. A critique of capitalism, then would be the reassertion of the conflict or antagonism between the worker/slave and the master, and furthermore the assertion that the bourgeoisie is not a proper master. In other words, it would be a defense of the dialectic--not in order to resolve it again in the abstractions of Hegel, but to then direct it from this false escape from the dialectic into a socialist, and then communist, actual escape. I'll elaborate this more later. Here is the passage from the Manifesto--I've italicized the portion of the text that is explicitly under consideration:

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.