oprah is a quitter

Music: Pete Namlook and Tetsu Inoue: 2350 Brodway, Volume Four (2006)

On Friday Oprah Winfrey announced that her popular daytime talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, will end on it's 25th anniversary on September 9th, 2011. Thus concludes one of the most successful, decades-long rhetorics of tokenism upon which the contemporary neoliberal subject was fashioned. As my colleague Dana Cloud concluded over thirteen years ago, "tokenist biography," such as Oprah's famous rags-to-riches story, "serves to blame the oppressed for their failures and to uphold a meritocractic vision of the American Dream that justifies and sustains a more troubling American reality" (download her extremely prescient essay here). Oprah's show is, in fact, synonymous with her biography, and so it is difficult to imagine what she will become or do without it.

Regardless, we should celebrate the demise of The Oprah Winfrey Show, as no other media production has done so much to promote a widespread investment in general unhappiness: suffer from racism? It's your fault. Don't make enough to feed your children? It's your fault. Neoliberalism hasn't a better poster child than Winfrey. As she brings her direct guidance to a close (we still have Drs. Oz and Phil, as well as the nauseatingly insincere Rachel Ray), it's particularly eye-opening (or, well, not at all) to underscore where she attributes her success:

That's right: magic. Forget the civil rights movements, feminism, and other social changes brought about by collective effort, thinking positive thoughts is the only way to make this life worth living.

Oprah, of course, is yet another easy target, and we can almost write the critique of neoliberalism in our sleep. But when we think about Oprah's influence, we also think about care and love, we are reminded of her tearful and swollen face. It's not simply that Winfrey is a product and vehicle of neoliberal ideology, it's also that she feels it, and that this feeling is not fake. Her own "magic" is the sense of presence she has across the screen, and, of course, the talk-show is emplaced in one's living room (we encounter her there, in intimate places). Her power is one of intimacy.

The only way to understand her appeal and power is in terms of the classic notion of eunoia; she exudes goodwill, from her first foray into politics (testifying before Congress on behalf of abused children) to her visible charity work. Despite however much we might critique Winfrey for her ideology, there's no question her "heart is in the right place." It's in our living rooms, after all.

Although I am not well versed in Foucauldian approaches to cultural critique (in graduate school, you pick your theorist and dig deep; Foucault was not my pick---Fred Jameson and Kenny Burke were), I have taken much interest in Foucault's later work, especially that on the care of the self and governmentality. I've been especially excited by the more recent work of Foucault being published, work that reveals a much more psychologically interested Foucault than previously assumed. Ron Greene recently presented a paper on the history of the field of Speech Communication in which he argued that "pastoral power" better characterized how the speech hygiene movement worked. Since I heard Ron's paper I've been thinking a good bit about pastoral power, even reading up a little here and there. "Pastoral power" is Foucault's concept for how Christian forms of management have "traveled," so to speak, into the biopolitical domain: at once individually and collectively focused (one works toward individual salvation while simultaneously attending to "the flock"), the pastoral helps to describe, I think, the imaginary adopted by figures like Winfrey. It puts power and religion on the same plane---and that helps me better figure why I have been so obsessed these many years with theological forms. The conception of the pastoral also seems to provide a space for psychoanalytic insight.

Conceptually, I'm drawn to the intersection of eunoia and the pastoral, the site at which a viewer of Winfrey's show is sutured to a pastoral vision in feeling. I'm thinking aloud here, and my ideas are admittedly half-baked, but I'm wondering about the link between the living room and the pulpit. Is there a way in which Winfrey and Obama help us to see better how the pastoral operates in contemporary politics, and in turn, in my kitchen? How is it that Oprah's tearful confessions on television translate into a regime change in Washington?

I betray my reading habits of late. I've been obsessed with Lauren Berlant's work. I've been trying to educate myself on the research on affect. Oprah's recent announcement strikes me as incredibly important, tied up at once with the intimate recesses of our homes and the Obama presidency all at once. I wonder, too, if the end of her talk show signals a new new: it all but sounds the death knell of broadcasting. Period. Politics is become narrow . This is why I think the "pastoral" is so fecund a concept . . . both individual and collective, it captures the ministry of Apple, Inc.