Statesmanship was for him a minuet to which specks of dust danced in the sunlight. That is how he justified to himself a politics which even the bourgeoisie at its zenith could not master without seeing through it as an illusion.
-- Walter Benjamin (from Selected Writings III, p.214) on Metternich
It's utterly predictable that David Brooks, perhaps for the first time in his adult life, should notice something substantial and important in the midst of an utterly disingenuous editorial, one which pretends to have achieved a fondness for Kerry while diligently serving his retard master by painting the challenger as boring, vague, and inconstant -- a rhetorical stance on Brooks' part one might describe as "strategic ambiguity."
And lo, as if the ways of consciousness were magical, or perhaps as if every letter's rightful recipient is always the author, that's exactly what Brooks has discovered: that Kerry has, over the years, filled the public sphere with so much incoherent-yet-excessive discourse that "he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity."
Faithful readers may recall that this issue arose earlier in sugarhigh!'s season, though regarding not the obsequies of campaign speech so much as the bloodiness of military maneuver and attendant stylized informatic morass. Let's then suspect that we are on to something: that the definitive condition of symbol management has ceased to be the persuasion towward a particular view, belief, ideology, but is rather the production -- so in keeping wiith the age -- of an excess of signification which at once denies the posssibility that one might ever be called to account for any particular action, and occupies the public sphere so profligately there isn't room for anyone else, nor does there seem to be any possibility for intervention. A post-modernism, but not a particularly salutary one.
The certainty that anyone committed to a particular course aside from the strategic ambiguities of politics as such is lost before beginning makes such commitment not-thinkable; all there is is that which appears, which has already appeared, which will continue to appear in its magisterial, dizzying dull dazzle, never quite in focus.
Posted by jane at July 28, 2004 03:38 AM | TrackBack
