Michelle Malkin pretending to relax on Saddam
In the 90s, when multiculturalism had the Right on the ropes, racism, so the story goes, was forced to move between-the-lines (of populist conservative discourse). As Žižek observes in The Universal Exception:
“In the election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sexist message is not publicly acknowledged — at the public level, it is sometimes even violently disavowed — but is instead articulated in a series of double-entendres and coded allusions. This kind of self-censorship is necessary if, in the present ideological conditions, Helms’ discourse is to remain effective. If it were to articulate directly, in a pubic way, its racist bias, this would render it unacceptable in the hegemonic political discourse; if it were effectively to abandon the self-censored coded racist message, it would endanger the support of its targeted electoral body. Conservative populist political discourse thus offers an exemplary case of a Power discourse whose efficiency depends on the mechanism of self-censorship: it relies on a mechanism that is effective only in so far as it remains censored.” (157)
Žižek is also, however, making a larger point about power ‘in general’. Whereas in the traditional model censorship occurs as a strategic intervention, in Žižek’s censorship is an internal, strategic ‘holding back’. It is less an effect or retreat than a mastery of suggestion.
“Against the image, ever-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive discourse or practice ‘censored’ by the Power, one is even tempted to claim that today, more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly to enhance the efficiency of the Power discourse itself.” (157)
Though it seems to me that Žižek is forcing a choice between two different ‘mechanisms of censorship’ — one that represses a marginal discourse, one that holds itself back strategically — the greater point he’s trying to make is that there are forms of power that depend on, rather than resist, censorship. The case could even be made that suggestion and insinuation are now the proper, opposed to exceptional, form of conservative populist racist discourse. In light of the recent election, this certainly seems as true today as ever.
If there was no discernible “Bradley Effect” (-when voters lie about their views to hide their racism, thus screwing up polling figures), after all, it’s not because racism has simply disappeared, but rather because there are simply too many pseudonymous issues and phrases that can be used, consciously or unconsciously, to recover racist positions without the label. The Bradley Effect is therefore an historical (rather than permanent or inevitable) sign or symptom of racism in the populace. To this point, in the run-up to election day Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight cited a February 2007 Pew Research article that found strong evidence of a Bradley Effect “spanning the window from Harold Washington in 1983 to Carol Moseley Braun in 1992″, but in the subsequent period, Silver hypothesized, the recession of this effect may be due to the religious right’s population of political discourse with ‘cultural issues’ that serve to validate these positions while at the same time moving racist codes between-the-lines.
There may be some relationship to the revival of the religious right in the 1990s. For members of the religious right, there are now ample and automatic reasons to vote against any liberal candidate, a.k.a. their positions on issues like abortion. In addition, the religious right has made voting along cultural grounds (as opposed to policy grounds) more socially acceptable in general. So long as the voter believes he or she can articulate a “valid” reason for voting against an African-American candidate, there is little reason to deceive a pollster about one’s intention.
So while conservative populist discourses have been forced to avoid identifiable historical forms of racism, this restriction has not proved a problem for the recuperating of similar sentiments in new disguises. The discourses attacking Jeremiah Wright (i.e. the black church), Obama’s birth certificate (i.e. his non-American-ness), and his secret Muslim faith (i.e. his terrorist affiliations), all make this plain. It is likewise only a matter of time before what is now considered between-the-lines and suggestive becomes recognized, on account of so much public scrutiny, as simply explicit, and to a certain extent acceptable.
What interests me out of this whole problematic, however, are the specific figures and strategies that allow one to be able to understand perfectly what is ‘really’ meant while at the same time being able to plausibly deny anything is being said at all. It’s pretty clear how these discourses work on a figurative level — e.g. sound bite of loud black preacher equals stereotypical dangerous, violent black man — but what’s less clear is how one can subscribe to the target belief while at the same sincerely denying that subscription. In a recent lecture, Žižek discussed this mode of ideology with attention to the subject side of the equation.
For Žižek, ideology today — in our supposedly post-ideological age — is constituted by a complex disavowal, a ‘pretending not to believe’. Where conservative discourses strategically self-censor to achieve their maximum effect — “to enhance the efficiency of the Power discourse itself” — the conservative believer who receives that discourse must also make sure that the positions subscribed to are not expressed in too explicit a form. A tenuous balance must be struck between message and code, with neither too obstructed by the other.
Žižek relates this special form of self-delusion to a number of situations, some commonplace and trivial — for example, how children and parents alike pretend to the other that Santa Claus exists, so as not to let the other down — some taking place on the level of world affairs and nationalist ideology.
(In his main example of the latter, Žižek describes the Soviet government’s habit of having the people themselves carry out rewritings of positions that were orthodox yesterday but heretical today, as when new entries for a recently released official encyclopaedia were mailed to the people with instructions to cut out and replace the old version. At which point Žižek observes that if the goal was simply to indoctrinate or censor, in the classical sense, then the citizens themselves could hardly be called upon to perform the operation. It’s thus less a matter of believing than of pretending to believe, and through this performance alone sustaining — through an absolute cynicism — the whole ideological edifice.)
To his many examples, I would like to add the special, perhaps historically novel, demeanor or comportment of the contemporary American (non-partisan) occupier — who, in order to be an occupier, must pretend he or she isn’t one.
Trophy shots of Saddam’s throne — now a genre unto itself — are to this extent especially symptomatic of the ideological structure in question. The throne, of course, is precisely that condensed figure of tyranny and succession that the Americans are intent on publicly disavowing while privately fulfilling. But this is not to say the former strategically ‘covers up’ the latter; on the contrary, it’s the former that, as a whimsical do-no-wrong self-righteous attitude, makes the latter possible: only by thinking they’re liberators are the conquerors able to conquer.
In the above photo, for instance, Michelle Malkin, the popular Conservative commentator, is taking special pains to not seem regal — to not act as the conqueror that she must pretend not to be, in order to be. The military force she represents is not seizing the throne so much as destroying it, mocking it, and disassembling its symbolic importance. It is now simply an amusing relic, ‘instant history’, a testament to the true emptiness of the symbols once ‘infused’ –- by despotic force –- with artificial observance. The very image of liberation is in fact, paradoxically, a troubled symptom of colonization.
It is thus essential for the Americans who have usurped the throne to prove — to themselves as much to others — that they have ‘really’ destroyed it. The historical novelty of American imperialism — what sets it apart from all the rest — might just come down to this strange mode of regard: namely that, for the first time, the imperialists need to pretend they’re not the conquerors ‘for whom they’ve been mistaken’. And yet … every soldier who has this photo taken knows implicitly to assume any demeanor but the one. They, like their ‘homeland’ supporters, are thus torn between two conflicting desires: to sit on the throne as the king they cannot be. (Why, after all, has Malkin, like so many others, decided to celebrate the destruction of the dictator by, of all things, imitating him?)
Malkin’s sarcastic body language, her ironic demeanor, the practiced disaffection all guard against this painful truth: that the Americans are on that throne ‘for real’, as conquerors, not liberators. And there’s simply no dose of humanitarian rhetoric large enough to disguise what every Iraqi knows — that they’ve been conquered, not freed, and that this ‘trophy shot’ is just that, one more degrading mockery of what should only be theirs to denigrate.
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