jane dark's sugarhigh!

loin du vietnam (updated)

More news from the plus ça change dept. There is something to be said here about political postmodernity — by which we mean nothing as subtle as the death of the Real or the triumph of the spectacle (either Debord's version, or that of Rumsfeld).

Bob Gates got his start as an apparatchik during the Vietnam wind-down, had to withdraw his nomination as CIA boss under Reagan because of his implication in Iran-Contra, and ascended finally to the spot under Bush pere.

In the nomination of Gates to replace Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense, we see with renewed clarity that Bush fils' habit of stocking his major posts with players from previous administrations is not some dull oedipal drama, as pseudo-thinkers periodically like to suggest; as an actual thinker once said, "there are, one would think, far more damaging things to be said about our social system than are available through the use of psychological categories." The reshuffling — open, self-reflexive, even comical — does indicate something like the endless circulation of used signs typical of postmodern cultural production; the administration's staff resembles nothing so much as a centerless, fragmented collage of previous administrations, composed of actual bodies. Even lesser (if pivotal) players turn out to be part of this rich tapestry; consider that Jim Webb, Virginia Democrat who delivered the Senate to his party, was Reagan's Secretary of the Navy.

To suggest that the staffing habits of the current administration are postmodern in their open signifying chains, unable to mean much while spastically invoking the hollowed-out quasi-meanings of past years, is only to say that we find ourselves not simply within "postmodernism," or "late capitalism," but the decline of empire — though, as we should be well aware, it will be a long and deadly comedy. Nor does the seeming familiarity and depthlessness of the cast of characters mean there is no novelty in the policies, nothing behind the cardboard cutouts propped up in various cabinet offices.

Indeed, one might take the dissembling of any substance to be one of the tasks of all that ceaseless circulation of surfaces, just as the moments of seeming difference — for is such seeming not part of postmodernity's form as well? — can only refer to their own contentless novelty. If one thinks "Nancy Pelosi, first woman to serve as Speaker of the House," has a nice ring to it, surely one must find, by the same logic, the phrase "Condoleezza Rice, the first African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State" (or Vice-President, or etc) to be even more plangent. But it will have no meaning other than to legitimate the policies it obscures...

Posted by jane at November 8, 2006 11:02 AM | TrackBack