The hallmark of genius and wisdom within postmodern conservatism is the intellectual subscriber's capacity to recognize, with Nietzsche-like accuracy, the degree of subtlety and depth of power that goes into our clever creations of reality itself. Made in the divine image, ours is the capacity to bring forth into the world things that are either real or aren't -- and we, during our brief time on Earth, are the most basic arbiters of what reality is. God has given us a set of instructions and guides, but the rationality we thought once might settle it all has come up a little short in the face of our bad modernist ability to make things seem, or even be, real and unreal at the same time. That is, we learned how to stipulate both that a thing is and isn't so, and then to use the oscillation between those two stipulations to generate mutually contradictory law-like propositions (if-then statements) from which we proceed to leverage attacks on other realities and phony realities.
I think we've had this tool in our human arsenal for some time, but the history of human psychology is in large the history of becoming conscious of how it works, and then becoming conscious of how we are conscious of it while in the process of making it worse. The consciousness would correlate with modernity (triggered in this respect by Machiavelli) and the meta-consciousness with postmodernity (in that respect by Nietzsche).
The good thing about the postmodern conservative is that he or she recognizes all this and repents of the meta-hijinks. The bad thing about Bill Kristol is that he has recognized all too well -- and not only refuses to repent, but intends to have a little fun in the high-stakes and blood-curdling game of getting Joe Lieberman elected Vice President of the United States. The audacity of his pomo mendaciousness is on full display at the start of
his latest Times column.
The anguished cries of Hillary supporters pierced the midday calm here on Saturday, as Barack Obama confirmed that his vice presidential choice was not Clinton, who got about 18 million votes this year running against him, but rather Joe Biden, who gained the support of a few thousand caucusgoers in Iowa before dropping out of the race.
(OK, I didn’t personally hear any anguished cries from my work space near the Pepsi Center. But I’m an empathetic guy — I felt as if I could hear them.)
Har har, right? It's funny because it's Hillary who's the big pomo, even more than Obama, the one who's always been about the politics of meaning and theatrically elevating unreal and empty catharsis into something that feels, but still isn't, real through the vehicle of big-media politics.
Sure, but Kristol is not the man who can make this joke, because the joke is on him, too. In a parody post too falsely satirical to be really a parody, Kristol just penned these lines two days ago at The Weekly Standard Blog ("The Democrats' Glass Ceiling"):
A modest suggestion to my justifiably outraged Democratic friends: Hillary’s name should be placed in nomination not for the presidency (Obama won that more or less fair and square)--but for the vice presidency. It would be an interesting roll call vote.
So the outrage is real, and the anguish is fake? Or is the anguish also real, but since Kristol was too far to hear them, he also really felt them? Or is his power to feel anguish actually unreal, which it must be if the anguish/outrage is real but Kristol is joking?
It's impossible to say, which is just as Kristol seems to want it. Following the pattern I abstracted out above, he (1) stipulates that outrage or anguish among Clinton's supporters over Obama's rejection of Clinton is justified; if it is justified, it is therefore real; (2) stipulates that the politics of feelings practiced by Obama and, even more so, by Clinton is preposterously suitable for mockery, and therefore trades in the unreal; (3) rhetorically treats the unreal (2) as if it were real, ostensibly for the purpose of parodying it, but actually for the purpose of getting as much anti-Democrat leverage out of (2) without having to concede that it, and not (1), is true.
Acrobatics like these are essential to an argument in which Clinton and her supporters are pathetic fools except in relation to Obama and his supporters, who are in some inexplicable sense even more pathetic and foolish; and in which all these Democrats are suddenly simultaneously equally ridiculous and contemptible next to Joe Lieberman, a Democrat who is precisely as liberal, if not more so, than Clinton and Obama. But he is far more full of 'hawkishness', that pomoneocon word for 'life force' or 'precious bodily fluids' that ranks right up there in mystery and bad metaphysics with 'toughness'. I do not know what 'hawkishness' means, other than spoiling for a fight. This from someone who is embarrassingly soft, on paleo terms, anyway, on casual interventions and a moderately large defensive network of projected power around the world.
For Kristol to win the day, he must convince Republicans that Joe Lieberman both is and is not a Republican, or that he is not a Republican yet 'actually' is. Because it's impossible to convince anyone that Joe Lieberman is a Republican, period, unless he switches parties, at which point it will be impossible to convince anyone that he is, full stop, a conservative. In order to do this, Kristol must create an ontological crisis in the Republican identity. He's doing so with a bad postmodern application of what IR theorist scholars call 'representational' or 'rhetorical' force, or what I have called simply 'metaforce'.
IR theorists have so far typically studied representational or rhetorical force as an attack which frames a target's identity in terms that contradict so painfully-yet-believably with the target's social and individual identity that the target, rather than risking the 'death' of their identity, shifts it to conform more closely with the attacker's framed or stipulated identity, seeking (although this is undertheroized) so settle along a point at the Pareto horizon where the pain of further conformance is neither greater nor less than the pain of maintaining the adjusted identity position. At this point, I theorize, a second-wave attack of metaforce, often used to seed the first wave, occurs: the target is therapeutically/rhetorically assured and reassured that the pain of change "IS" not nearly as bad as it "SEEMS". The ontological fantasy -- that is, the unreal post hoc identity position desired by the attacker -- is transformed by metaforce into something which is not, yet is, MORE REAL than the ontological reality -- that is, the real propter hoc identity position maintained by the defender prior to attack.
Thus Kristol:
If you’re conscientiously pro-life, you will have reservations about a pro-abortion-rights V.P. If you’re a proud conservative, Lieberman hasn’t been one. If you’re a loyal Republican, you’d much prefer someone from within the ranks.
But if you’re pro-life, conservative and/or Republican, you certainly don’t want Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid running the country. If a McCain-Lieberman ticket is the best way to thwart that prospect, you could probably learn to live with it — even perhaps to like it.
That's my bold -- a letter-perfect case study of the use of what I have called the logic of therapeutics to apply metaforce in the pursuit of mass identity change as a means toward political power. Lots of people on the academic left do this -- and indeed they are the ones responsible for my direct interest in applying Rieffian social theory to constructivism. But Kristol is by far the prize pig if you want to see my most highfalutin theorization concretized in real-world practice.
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