On Butler's (and Obama's) exuberance

I received by email a posting by Judith Butler. In this piece, “Uncritical Exuberance?” Butler reflects on the reactions that Obama's win have elicited in the left. Although the title offers some space for ambivalence (the title is in questin marks) the rest of the piece forcefully argues against the risk of identifying Obama’s victory as our own victory.

I have some superficial objections to this piece. Many statements made in the first pages are explicitly or implicitly contradicted later. It relies on anecdotical evidence of questionable verosimilitude (the inverse Bradley effect exemplified as “I know that Obama is a Muslim and a Terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway; he is probably better for the economy.”) The picture of an Obama-lover ready to gain deliverance by the simple election of a black president is equally unbelievable. “The election of Obama” Butler writes “means that the terrain for debate and struggle has shifted, and it is a better terrain, to be sure. But it is not the end of struggle.” I didn’t know that such naïve people could actually exist and I doubt their actual existence. It warns us against "nationalism" and the inexistence of a general "we" but it cannot avoid inscribing itself in that paradigm when the time for political concreteness come. Last but not the least, this piece relies on an image of Obama that is too close to the one produced by the media and too far from the one that prevailed in the people who mobilized themselves behind his candidacy.

But I have also less superficial disagreements. They belong to three orders. The first one I will call, following Butler herself, the domain of the exuberant. The second has to do with the reduction of the political to a liberal and even neo-liberal version of the dynamics of antagonism. The third one refers to the level of the actual construction of reality in political terms.

My first objection to Judith Butler’s piece is that after eight years of obscurantism invites us to be oblivious to the simple fact that the sun rises. Its sober tone (a tone perhaps affected by what appears to be a devastating triumph of right wing politics around proposition 8 in California) is an invitation to an always necessary reflection. But there is no politics and much less progressive politics without imprudence and exhilaration. If there is one thing that we have learned after the socialist collapse is that alegría is one of the most vital components of any progressive politics. Alegría is of course a Spanish word without proper equivalent in English –and in very Heideggerian fashion, I would say that a good deal of our progressive future depends on the possibility of translating alegría. Alegría reminds us that politics is part of existence and that even in defeat (and more rightly so in victory) we have a claim to happiness. Finally, alegría cannot be aligned with the politics of calculation in which everything is translated into numeric gain and loses. This politics of calculation, of tactics without present and strategy without future is the one that has been so deeply inscribed in our everyday life by the neo-liberal colonization of political mentality.

This latter observation is already an introduction to my second contention. Butler’s piece leaves something very important out: the people. (And yes, I am a populist). The heroes of her narrative are Barack Obama, a few leftists (and inside the few the few who are immune to uncritical optimism) and millions of voters who become political subjects every two or four years. In her piece politics takes the form of a vertical relationship between leader and populace mediated by imaginary identifications. But is not this, exactly, the style of political liberalism (Clinton’s style) against which Obama campaigned? Was not his call a call to end political decisions based on polling? Was not he insisting that the value of a strategy cannot consist in the way it agrees with the prejudices of the day? During his campaign, Obama repeated several times that the problem with the Clinton administration was its failure to change the mindset of Americans in a way that will alter the ideological domination of conservative ideas in American cultural and political life. Clinton suffered from fatalism. He became conservative because he thought that the US is an incurable conservative country. For Obama, on the other hand, some form of social, political and cultural engineering has always been part of his political agenda. It is not by chance that the last image of Obama’s 30 minute infomercial is a dimming off of his own figure while the voice in off invites people to regain “our democracy”. This fight against fatalism was also an important part of his strategy in the Democratic primary, where the forces of destiny were also defeated. To sum up: Obama’s call is in good part a call for political activism. In contrast, I perceive in Butler’s piece a deep a-political resignation to the way the dices roll. It is telling to me that the word that defines perhaps better than any other Obama’s message, mobilization, is completely absent from Butler’s posting.

The lack of attention to the fact that politics is about changing people’s minds and hearts is perhaps at the center of one of Butler’s most polemical statements. “It becomes all the more important to think about the politics of exuberant identification with the election for Obama when we consider that support for Obama has coincided with support for conservative causes.”
Butler is indeed pointing to the most salient feature of the recent election, although drawing, in my opinion, the wrong conclusion. This salient fact is simply that a center-right nation voted a center-left, liberal president. Butler cautions us: don't be too high on Obama, the same people who voted for him also voted for prop 8. The truth is that many people in the country would have also voted for prop 8 if they have had the chance. And yet the same people (or some of the same people) also voted for Obama. The real question (and reason for cautious exuberance) is: How is it that a country terrorized by its press and its priests, bombarded by all forms of stereotypical propaganda, managed to vote for an Afro-American candidate called Barack Obama? Judith Butler sees here a "disjunction” and even a masking of “conflicting beliefs.” She doesn't ponder the fact that this disjunction did not fall from the skies, but was caused by the political process itself or better said, by Barack Obama himself. The disjunction is the result of political praxis or of praxis as politics. This is why these kind of contradictions are so common in modern democracy. They are the essence of what we call “hegemony”. A politics of dis-identification can never be the answer to a politics of identification. But what is specially worrisome in Butler's argument is how identification/dis-identification replaces the political tout-court. The political is that moment when people change. They do things they haven’t done before. The disjunction is real but it needs to be interpreted. I want to offer an optimist interpretation here (it doesn’t matter that is not the true one, it can always be turned into the true one because the event is yet undecided): some conservative people voted for Obama because they don’t want to be conservative anymore (Colorado). And yet they do not know how to be something else. This takes me to the final point.

It is through sustaining the disjunction that we reach the deep level of what really is: the concept of our time. And the concept of our time, fueled by the destruction of the speculative bases of neo-liberal dominance, is the problem of reality itself. (See my posting La vida es sueñofor a clarification on this). The concept of our time is the gap opened by the fact that a conservative people have voted for a non-conservative candidate and by the fact that they did so with full and complete awareness of their act. No "reverse Bradley effect" will suffice to explain this astounding result. Obama's explanation itself, this shows the vitality of American democracy, is the most verosimile, but is not enough. As a matter of fact, the whole in reality opened by the financial crisis and the election of Barack Obama, cannot be closed theoretically, but only practically. This practice should take as its point of departure the specific political opening caused by Obama’s triumph. Leftists, liberals and lovers of life in general should embrace this opening as a way of affecting history. Not very often in a life time is the political destiny of a country in reach of those who want to change it. If I agree in anything with Butler is that this change will not come from Obama, but it will not come either from sustaining a “critical relationship” towards the processes of socio-political identifications. Instead, we need to clarify the level of political reality or, what is the same in this context, the level at which political change can be effected. In this point, I find Butler once again, conservative and too oblivious of the actual changes this election have brought about. Butler goes on to lay down a political agenda that will satisfy the left (closing Guantanamo, ending the war in Irak, find a diplomatic solution for Afghanistan). All this, she adds, has to be done in the first two months in office if Obama doesn’t want to risk the disillusionment of a left that, we have been told, is wrong in entertaining illusions anyway. Although I agree with Butler’s agenda, she fails to take notice of the opening that Obama’s electoral victory is providing. It is, after all, not only a matter of keeping the old left satisfied, but more importantly of expanding and even creating a new left. And for that creation other venues are possible. The one that I uphold can be ciphered in two words: immigration reform.