Signify’in: The Obama Story
By Mustapha B. Marrouchi
08 December,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Ever since Novermber 4, 2008, I have found myself bearing witness to an event, a monumental event; a redemptive story, that is also postcolonial avant la lettre: the election of a “midnight child,” whose origin is steeped in a geographically and socially diverse black and brown and cream community—a nation within the nation, really—to the highest office in America.[i] And, I cannot help dreaming and hoping, reminiscing and celebrating, hollering and singing: “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,” solemnizing the ritual of a magical transformative moment in history. I have also realized that what I am writing today is still steeped in the Bush era; an era of intimidation, shame, and mortification.[ii] Assaulted by these dynamic forces at the rendez-vous of victory, I raise the following questions: Can reality reclaim its rightful place in post-Bush America? From now on, do we hang out together, or do we hang out separately and how are we to understand the significance of this historic event, at least within the register of the thinking being that is Barak Obama, a postmodern savage who has come of age to claim the US presidency? What subtracts the sheer “what happens” from the general determination of “what is” at this “pre-emergent” fragment of history?[iii] After all, what composes an event is always mired in a con-text, in a people, and in a language.[iv] I have called this fragment of history “Obamerica.”[v] At one pole, it represents a shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority. At the other pole, it stands as a sign of something more: progress in the Kantian sense of the word (i.e. ethical progress, not just material development).[vi]
Still, the “pre-emergent” event I am discussing is an occurrence only insofar as there exists a site for it within an effectively deployed constituency (one that contains multitudes--composite America comes to mind). It is in this sense that the event becomes a rupture, even if the rupture does not exonerate us from thinking about the being of the event in and of itself, what Alain Badiou aptly called “trans-being,” and of which I have just said that it is in every instance a site of resistance.[vii] It is also an exorcism of the past and a signifying for a better future. And so, at this important juncture in our world’s history, one is tempted to ask: Beyond the acknowledgement that the event is a site of struggle for social justice, does the trans-being account for being qua being? My position amounts to answering “yes.” For in order to probe the rupture, we must consider the event that is Obamerica as a fold between extensive segmentation and the intensive continuum. Let me explain: Waking up to the drums of a victory without illusions is like watching Mayer’s black-and-white 16-mn Memories of Mirrors. The film, like the Obama story, holds up a mirror to the viewer, it accurately reflects the medium itself, as the light of the camera flashes toward us to make a connection between the past, the present, and the future; black, white, and brown; men, women, and transgender. It is in this sense that the event is a trait d’union between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and seductive: this Obamerica will end up coming. The revenant, too, is going to come. It will not be long. But how long will it be, is a question in time answered.
“It
takes time,” Hélène Cixous reminds us. “It
can take a long time, this arrivance.”[viii] Yet it is because
of the imminent suggestion that the “hour is near,” that
Obamerica “smells like time.”[ix] What the schism (with
the past) also brings forward is the idea of Obamerica as the gateway
to futurity, open to expectation that “if it be not now, yet
it will come.”[x]HaHH For now at least, the figure of Obama,
not as the policeman of the new world order but rather as the night-watchman
on the ramparts of a exhausted America whose “time is off its
hinges” enough for “poetic and thinking peepholes”
to open on migrant meanings, is the image of hospitality; as the receptiveness
of his election to new and unintended interpretations is itself a
model of a pluralism consisting of diverse consitituents. Derrida
makes the point:
It is possible to gather under a single roof the apparently disordered
plurivocality of these interpretations . . . it being understood this
house will always be haunted rather than inhabited by the meaning
of the original? This is the stroke of genius . . . the signature
of the Thing [. . . ] “Obama.”[xi]
On this view, the event has a decisive role in our thinking about the peace to come, about our “paroxysms of delight,” as one poet put it; a preoccupation which directs our attention to a new sense of the political in America and the world. For Obamerica brings to a close the age of Reagan, the era of conservatism, and the epoch of the southern strategy. The economics of greed, the culture of indifference to the poor, and the politics of fear have run their course once and for all. The war in Iraq, Katrina, and the Wall Street collapse were the three nails in the coffin of the age of illusion. For nearly 30 years, the elevating of deregulated markets, the glorifying of the lives of the rich and famous, and the trivializing of poor peoples’ suffering has shaped the climate of opinion. And like the American Hamlet Blanche DuBois, in white literary bluesman Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the world of make-believe in which we lived has been shattered forever by reality, history, and cool. Truth and justice crushed to earth do, at some point, rise again.[xii] In the meantime, will Obama’s grand ascension to the White House challenge him to translate symbol into substance? Change comes from the bottom up, not the top down, as Barak Obama himself said time and again during the election campaign. Granted, but our hope remains on a tightrope. And America and the World hang in the balance.
The felicitous upshot is that we cannot help but tell the story again. The Obama victory is a sign of history in the triple sense of Kant’s signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum.[xiii] It is an act in which the memory of the long past of slavery and struggle for its abolition reverberates; a happening which now demonstrates a change; a hope for future achievements. The victory is also a trace, the timing of which could not be more perfect in that postcolonial literature, like local agriculture, is kept in postcolonial dependence. Both have been integrated into the global economy. Crops are exported, peasants are thrown off their land and pushed into sweat-shops, and poorer countries have to rely more and more on imported foods. At this juncture of history, we cry out loud that literacy, like food, particularly in the Third World where soaring grain prices (caused in part by the use of crops for biofuels) have meant starvation from Haiti to Ethiopia, is not a commodity. Or is it?
Notes
[i] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “In Our Lifetime,” The Root.com 5 November 2008; Cornel West, “President-Elect Barak Obama,” USNews.com 5 November 2008; Ishmael reed, “Morning in Obamerica: Change, Change, Change,” blackagendareport.com 6 November 2008.
[ii] There is an ample and cogent analysis of the Bush folly in Scott Horton, “Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration,” Harper’s Magazine (December 2008): 49-61.
[iii] The concept of “pre-emergent” was coined by Raymond Williams. For more on the subject, see his Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London & New York: Verso, 2007): 99.
[iv] Remember: It took fifty years of struggle for equal rights to reach the mountain top.
[v] I borrow the formula from Ishmael Reed.
[vi] It is in The Contest of Faculties that Kant asks and answers a simple but difficult question: Is there true progress in history? For him, progress cannot be proven, but we can discern signs which indicate that progress is possible. The French Revolution was such a sign. The Iranian one was another. For more on the subject, see Immanuel Kant, in Hans Reiss, ed. Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991): 45-6.
[vii] Alain Badiou, L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988): 34.
[viii] Hélène Cixous, “What is it o’clock? Or the door (we never enter),” tr. Catherine MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London & New York: Routledge, 1998): 61.
[ix] Ibid., 65.
[x] William Shakespeare, Hamlet [V.ii. 159], in The Complete Works, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al (1997; New York: Norton, 2008): 1698.
[xi] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, tr. Peggy Kamuf (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 22.
[xii] West, “President-Elect,” 5.
[xiii] Kant, Political Writings, 123.
