Monday

Thinking beyond the spectacle

After watching the inauguration on the Internet, I thought to myself that I just felt like a cheerleader for the State. The jingoism of flag waving, empty symbolism, demonstration of military might and the worship of celebrity demonstrated how the inauguration contained seemingly incompatible ideologies that still coexisted with each other and maintained ideological hegemony.  In other words, U.S. State power appeared permanent, fixed and “real”, as well as, a place to locate social change.  This idea comes despite the historical and primary source data that highlights imperialist States, like England and the U.S. for example, have been the biggest perpetrators of violence against people of color, indigenous societies, women, people categorized and labeled “disabled,” working class communities, homosexuals, etc. over the past 350 years.  This last part is important, as social and progressive change cannot be realized within a hierarchical, racist, sexist, classist, ableist, colonialist, and an inherently oppressive institution like a State as I hope this blog will demonstrate.  I know that I refer to the United States, but by no means am I trying to paint “villains” or “evil-doers” and other nation-states have just as much to answer for as the United States does.  Instead, as you will see, power is reproduced much more sophisticatedly than just top-down or through simplistic binaries of Us vs. Them, but also through what we consider knowledge or how we understand the world around us.  States are merely one piece to a much larger puzzle.

However, I am quite aware of the historical significance of the election of Obama.  It effectively demonstrates what radicals have argued all along: that political hope can amass people out of complacency into action. I am also aware that an election of an African American man speaks volumes that people are willing to adapt their beliefs about race and ethnicity, which points to the possibility of social change occurring in the future which should sustain hope for all of us. I am not critiquing the President per se, but more his symbolic and representational existence and the political frameworks we are given that are deemed appropriate, real, or possible.  I am not concerned with Obama the individual, then, but Obama as representational of a larger system of meanings, discourses, ontological frameworks, epistemologies, and ideologies.  The individual, as it has been constructed in the West, is more of a testament to the emergence and rise of mercantile capitalism rather than some empirical reality of us overcoming odds, persevering, and working hard to master and tame our world. Continue…