Apocalypse Now? The Subaltern Has Spoken

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© 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).