Reaganism in Literary Theory. Jeremiah Bowen
or unexpectedness.64 This prepares the listener for the kind of hackneyed anti-intellectualism one might expect from radio pop: “They read all the books but they can’t find the answers,” Mayer tosses off, with all the casual self-assurance of one who has never bothered to read the books, because he feels no pressing need to find the answers. The chorus is a gleeful encomium to Mayer’s own unstudied, preternatural wisdom: “I wanna run through the halls of my high school, I wanna scream at the top of my lungs,” he sings in a falsetto softly mimicking the energy of a scream, “I just found out there’s no such thing as the real world, just a lie you got to rise above.” The reality on offer in his high school is, the song makes clear, the secure but workaday life of a conventional “American dream”—the kind of career, marriage and family life that can seem like paradise to those excluded from it, though it has been limned as a hell of capitulation by artists of every generation.
The metaphysical promise of American consumerism is brought to its romantic apotheosis in Mayer’s encouragement to break on through this staid image of an easy but ultimately unfulfilling living: “They love to tell you, ‘Stay inside the lines,’” he observes in the rising harmonies of the song’s bridge, before dropping back down, to again build with each word of promise, “But something’s better […]”—now rising to a crescendo of falsetto harmony—“[…] on the other side.” This is a sweetened commercial concoction of the rebellious fantasy familiar from decades past, a synthesis of Pat Boone and Jim Morrison. It is a fantasy produced by privilege, in which the only way to lose is not to try, and one has only oneself to blame for not realizing one’s boldest dreams. This fantasy is just as fundamentally predicated on faith in the whole agency of power as any conspiracy theory: A path is planned and available to you, it claims, and if you do as you are told, all your predictable needs will be provided. The society Mayer dreams in falsetto is the family socialism of wealthy white well-intentioned parents, an image of society compatible with Sedgwick’s account of D. A. Miller’s paternalistic welfare state. Such authorities mean well, Mayer’s song implies, but they nevertheless fail to see the grander life each of us can live if we just throw away their velvet chains and embrace the risk of inspiration. The contempt bred by this predetermined path to success is clear in Mayer’s promise that, in order to possess a better life than this, one need only ignore the clueless adults who lack the imagination or courage of youth: “All of our parents, they’re getting older, I wonder if they’ve wished for anything better, while in their memories, tiny tragedies […].” In short, to avoid the petty, tragic lives of one’s sad old parents, Mayer explains, one need only ignore them and follow one’s own self-aggrandizing dreams of glory.
The song ends with Mayer imagining his moment of vindication, after he has proven himself definitively right and demonstrated his innate superiority over all those around him. He plans his triumphant return to the 10-year reunion held in his high school’s cafeteria, to “stand on these tables before you” and gloat about his success, presumably to all those classmates who did not listen to the advice he screamed as he ran past them in the hallways, or who doubted his inevitable apotheosis. Just before this climax comes a brief interlude in which the music slows and Mayer wails, as if to summarize the previous 50 years of white male teenage fantasy in popular song, “I am invincible, I am invincible, I am invincible as long as I am alive.” Not only are we reminded here of the godlike omnipotence that defines phallic value, but also the immortality it implies, the eternalization that defeats history and change, that insists like a track West produced for Jay-Z, “never, never, never, never change, I never change.”65 Mayer and West seem to imagine themselves like Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron, a supremely powerful figure somehow hobbled by the machinations of external authorities. Indeed, this is the fantasy necessary to invest in Reagan’s neoliberal promise of unaided success, overcoming the weights and blinders of parents’ rules or government regulations, to rise into the skies and beyond.
But this fantasy of overcoming does not propose an alternative to the powers it disdains, nor does it even reject the form of power imposed by conventional authorities. Instead, it merely posits that those currently supposed to possess authority are imposters, allowing the enunciating subject to take their rightful place of supremacy, claiming authenticity as embodiment of power. It is as though these men have discovered their parents are not the all-powerful beings they seemed to be through a child’s eyes, but instead of challenging the image of potency that shapes their expectations, they disqualify the compromised potency that defines their experience. Instead of questioning their belief in an all-powerful being—as perhaps merely the fantasy of a child still growing into full embodiment and empowerment, aspiring to a simplistic perfection because it is their first imagination of power—they angrily blame their parents for failing to realize omnipotence. By rejecting and negating the defeated wills and “tiny tragedies” of their parents, they seem to imagine they will emerge into possession of the supreme potency they presume. This is only possible on the basis of emulative, aspirational identification with a figure beyond conventional power, as in West’s ironic articulation of his own divinity: “I am a god, even though I’m a man of God, my whole life in the hand of God.” Though it may seem that a god cannot devote himself to God, it is in fact only by emulative identification with God that West can imagine himself as a god.
West’s reliance here on the apparent contradiction of supremacy and subordination to provoke a second thought in his listener illustrates how even his simplest lyrics demonstrate an artistic complexity lacking in Mayer’s. Even when they communicate the same thing, “but in different words,” West exploits internal contradictions to achieve unexpected rhetorical effects, while Mayer projects a flawless consistency without internal division or surprise. In consequence, both West’s and Mayer’s lyrics can be cited to illustrate common fantasies, but West’s can also be mined for trajectories of traversal. “I am a god, even though […]” In this dialectical movement, West includes in his lyric the motor that produced it, evidence of the drive that pushed him to such extremes of articulation. West’s “even though” depends on the capacity to entertain a perspective despite being convinced it is wrong: The phrase signals that, while he can see why his divinity would appear to contradict his dependence upon a divinity, this contradiction is only apparent. He concludes on the side of wholeness, and thus like Mayer on the side of narcissism, but he acknowledges at least the appearance of contradiction. An equivalent gesture in Mayer’s song might be a prominent acknowledgement that the certainty with which he announces his exceptional destiny and condemns the conformity of his parents must appear to others as the utterly banal and commonplace hubris of a privileged youth. West’s acknowledgment of contradictory perspectives suggests how an element of double consciousness can interject contradiction and contingency even into the closed loop of his narcissistic fantasy.
This acknowledgment of contradiction also allows for the possibility of inferentially traversing privilege. For example, if one can acknowledge that others’ evaluations are wrong, one can also see when others are treating one as superior without succumbing to belief in one’s superiority. In other words, it allows for the possibility of sanity. The relation West describes, between the self as divinity and its dependence upon a divine, is one that Lacan describes in terms of the relation between two Freudian terms, the Ichideal (“I-ideal”) and the Idealich (“ideal-I”), of which other psychoanalysts have spoken indifferently.66 In one’s relations with others, those others seem to desire and therefore perceive more than is accounted for in one’s self-image or Idealich, one’s idea of oneself. This seems to corroborate a potential for identity with the Ichideal, the ideal image of a self in one’s ideological context. If others seem to like or want something in me that is greater or other than I see in myself, then perhaps I am more like the standard of personal perfection than others are. This ideal of a perfect person, which differs among cultures and times in its definitions of what is universally and perfectly beautiful, intelligent or good, this Ichideal “governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others depend.”67
One way this governance functions is by organizing affinities, constituting a central standard of value, in emulative relation to which all judgments of taste, truth or justice can be determined. Such judgments are called “moralistic,” in a tradition that one can trace from Nietzsche, through Heidegger and Sartre to Lacan, and beyond to Paul de Man’s use of