te deum for fed-ex
Music: Harold Budd: Luxa (1996)
It is not a coincidence that both K-Fed (hereafter Fed-Ex) and Rummy were divorced this week: the popcycle electracy electorate has as much---if not more---of a voice in partnerships as the political electorate . . . if we can still maintain such a distinction. The hackneyed observation is that interpellation is not a one-way street; Britney is hailed by screened life as much as George. We have our posterchildren of popcyclic overdetermation for the week, but it would be a mistake to identify them as Kevin or Donald. The question for me is: how did Britney and George resist for so long? Is there a way that we might draw inspiration and strength from their homologous hard-headed refusal to succumb to their storied destinies?
In part, Joan Copjec has an answer (though one has to wonder now that "angelology" is the new "hauntology"). In a footnote on a chapter about Ronald Reagan in Read My Desire, Copjec lift's a concept from Freud's writings on the case of Dora:
In describing her father, Dora used the phrase "ein vermögender Mann[a man means," behind which Freud detected the phrase "ein unvermögender Mann [a man without means, unable, impotent]." In proffering her description, Dora was declaring her demand for a master; in reinterpreting her description, Freud was indicating the sort of master the hysteric prefers.
Copjec uses the concept of the impotent man to explain how Americans routinely elect "a master who is demonstrably fallible---even, in some cases, incompetent." The reason, she argues, is that the vanity at the heart of American pluralism depends on an "unvermögender Other" to maintain our unique, individual differences---the very same differences that voter after voter coming to the polls on Tuesday hold so dear. You'll recall I blogged about Mr. Righteous Voter on Tuesday. Mr. Righteous Voter is the creature who demands absolute and completely anonymity all the while making his individual difference known to everyone in the room; this is the paradox of democracy. One way in which the paradox of individual difference and anonymity is managed, one way in which the requirement that you and I must give up our particularity (or if you want, singularity) in the figure of abstract number for democracy to work (in both senses) is achieved, is by learning to love an unvermögender Other.
At first blush, we can easily hold up George W. Bush as the unvermögender Other of our time (my essay on Speilberg's War of the Worlds tries to make that case). We can also hold up Clinton for much the same reason (just remember the "blue dress," mmmm-kay?). And, if you have any faith in structuralism, then Barack Obama is doomed unless we can find a discernable problem with him (race does not count here, about which in a future post). Nevertheless, I think we can identify St. Britney and George as the paradigm citizen finding and falling in love with an unvermögender Other. Their divorces thus become synecdoche for the "change in public opinion."
The reason these men were loved for so long---for years---is because George and Britney are, in the end, hysterical subjects who are trying to be what they believe the Other wants. But the hysterical position is hard to maintain forever; one has to get up from the sofa---or eventually leave the movie theatre---to take a piss. The illusion must always come to an end when, as Baudrillard says in The Spirit of Terrorism, the excess of reality accrues to the point that it cannot be ignored (or swells your bladder so much you just gotta get to the john). For Britney, the absolute event was unquestionably this footage:
For Bush it was not so simple. His other Other, people like you and me, are upset that the first official death count of civilians in Iraq is at least 130,000, and almost 3,000 U.S. military personnel have died as well. I guess what is most infuriating is that the Bush decision to cut his impotent Other has little to do with real people or real death; it's just another shift in the hyperreality of the popcycle screen. At least with Britney's dumping Fed-Ex, she seems to be sending a heart-felt signal back to her fans.