Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
This provides little opportunity for the conflict and change that conventionally shape a plot, and that allow us to invest in a character’s inconsistency or incompleteness, its reality effect.
Narratives in which omnipotent evil faces perfect good are the domain of melodrama, moralism, popular mythologies and exoteric religiosity. Successful activist strategies, in contrast, have historically proceeded by strategically targeting the mechanisms of oppression at their contingently weakest points, on the basis of some reasoned and historically grounded analysis of the systemic structures and functions of power. While superheroes usually make war, settling zero-sum conflicts by means of definitive violence, activists and community organizers like the Black Panthers are distinguished from terrorists and rebel armies by their cultivation of long-term commitments to the hard and slow work of addressing the needs of their communities. The Panthers’ school breakfast programs, funded by Johnson’s Great Society, as well as their programmatic supervision of police to deter violence demonstrate their support for governance in accord with the democratic principle of “all power to all the people.”61
Sedgwick acknowledges this strategic approach to systemic change in describing Patton’s response, which seeks to shift focus from an unproductive concern with sensationalism and spectacle, to a more productive concern with the historical mechanisms of political power and state neglect. The paranoid orientation that seeks the “true cause” of oppression in a transcendental agent or essence, in contrast, cultivates the fear and aggression entailed by systemic oppression. This encourages intelligent young people, like Late Registration-era Kanye West and we who listened to him, to embrace the false empowerment of consumerist narcissism and competitive supremacy, supported and rationalized by conspiracy-theoretical melodramas and mythologies.
For Sedgwick, Patton’s reply to her query about an AIDS conspiracy confirms it is not enough to ask what is true; we must ask what that truth accomplishes, what it does and what one does with it. Sedgwick calls this “an unremarkable epiphany,” part of the “habitual practices” of academic critical theory and the hegemony of the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” However common this pragmatic insight may be in literary studies, it has certainly been linked, from Said through Sedgwick and beyond, to Foucault’s concern with the active social power of knowledge. But while both Foucault and Ricoeur treat of the hermeneutics of suspicion, Sedgwick shows deference to Ricoeur’s construction here, claiming that he defines “very productive critical habits,” which she calls “perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself.” However, she also suggests that these habits “may have had an unintentionally stultifying side effect”: “They may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments for the seeker, knower, or teller.”62 In short, she suggests that the hermeneutics of suspicion may have introduced the pragmatics of truth by way of a definition too narrow in its affective range, conflating the paranoid attitude with consideration of truth’s pragmatic aspect as such. This default to paranoia, which I would correlate with a default to disqualification ad hominem, can get in the way of knowing what to do with the knowledge we produce, and obstruct our view of what others do with that knowledge.
Sedgwick makes this point in the context of opposing her own suspicious response to the AIDS epidemic to Patton’s pragmatic, caretaking response. While Sedgwick describes herself as wondering first about the agent of the harm, Patton seemed to have already moved on to a concern with addressing and ameliorating those harms. Patton makes it clear that she had already concluded the Reagan administration was to blame, at least insofar as they did not care about queer lives, and were all too happy to neglect the situation. But Sedgwick seems to have been concerned to demonstrate a culpable agency, while Patton seems content to acknowledge a pattern of action, and to act on the basis of that knowledge—by working to ameliorate the crisis, since Reagan and US government agencies could not be trusted to do so. The “paranoid” position that Sedgwick describes is not only characterized by identification and overvaluation of a “higher” agency, as exemplified by West’s praise for Trump, but is therefore also invested in treating that agency as the arbiter of truth and significance, entreating it to recognize truth and warrant action, to confer legitimacy on one’s assignation of blame by admitting guilt. But when their power is predicated on harm, and is likely to be compromised by exposure, those in power have every reason to persist in bad faith and maintain disavowals indefinitely.
The overvaluation of the higher or central agency is the narcissistic premise that authoritarian permissiveness relies on to construct the dramatic scenarios of its social fantasy. Its obverse is the narcissistic invincibility of youthful rebellion, familiar to anyone who has consumed the popular culture produced by the American Century. As in so much popular music, both self-deification and rebellious invincibility have been consistent themes in West’s output, manifest since his 2001 breakout success as producer of four songs on Jay-Z’s classic album The Blueprint. West’s tracks are characterized by selectively sampled, often sped-up loops of the sort of self-aggrandizing choruses that are customary in hip-hop, like his edit of The Doors’ “Five to One,” cut to repeat “gonna win, yeah we’re takin’ over.” The most famous is “Izzo (H.O.V.A),” in which the chorus spells out what Jay-Z calls his “God name,” “Jay-Hova”: “H to the izz-O, V to the izz-A.” By 2013, West was making this kind of claim much more explicitly in a solo song titled “I Am a God.”
In West’s best songs, a thrilling rebellious energy flows from this narcissistic triumphalism, but without a revolutionary systemic critique of inequities to connect that energy to its practical conditions and consequence. So while he often calls out pertinent historical enemies of the black community like Reagan and Bush, he inevitably presents an alternative that merely reverses the supremacist form of their claim to power. This rebellion is a mirror image, rather than the transformative alternative that defines revolution. That distinction can be seen in his attitude toward education, which seems like a reaction to moralistic pedagogy, but one that only posits an opposing supremacism, a superior internal standard of reference that overcomes the inferior standard of the other. He defines the message of his first solo album in terms of the implications of its title, The College Dropout: “All that’s saying is make your own decisions. Don’t let society tell you, ‘This is what you have to do.’”63 West discloses his class privilege with a passing reference to the presumption he would go to university. “People told me to stay in school,” he mentions, meaning college rather than high school. Of course, for many young people in the United States, college is not a duty to be avoided, but an unlikely opportunity that cannot be presumed, whether due to cost or to their social context, in which a degree is not the norm.
But this disclosure of privilege is not to be rebuked of itself, as it can be revelatory. In this case, it seems to condition West’s ability to disregard a common experience of moralistic education that can be called, after Jacques Lacan, “orthopedic,” in the etymological sense of “straightening” children or bringing them into line. In simple terms, the orthopedagogue begins with a predetermined standard and works to make the student conform to that standard, rather than discerning from the student’s interests and affinities a direction for development. Both a critique of orthopedic pedagogy and some of the consequences of West’s privilege are indicated—along with his famously cavalier nonconformity—by comments to a hip-hop journalist, in which West praises a white singer-songwriter known for slick, radio friendly production and mainstream appeal: “I listen to John Mayer, and his song ‘No Such Thing’ is exactly what my [philosophy] is about, but in different words.” Upon closer attention, the observation turns out to be as apt as it is unexpected, and West’s relevance as an artist is connected with the narcissism that makes it possible for him to confess an unfashionable affinity with such idiosyncratically defiant vulnerability.
Mayer’s articulation of West’s philosophy is less revealing as a work, lacking West’s reflexive complexity. But when it is considered in the context of this evidentiary reference, mediatized and repurposed as an articulation of West’s message, Mayer’s pablum becomes, if anything, more directly indicative of the systemic fantasy in