Plasma Pool

Of course you’re familiar with Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. Have you ever observed sand fleas? Well I’m working on a film which not only substantiates it but illustrates perfectly the metaphor of the theoretic and the real situation. And after all that, what else is there?

—William Gaddis, The Recognitions (1955)

***

On Monday, I was discussing campaign rhetoric with my father, a nonreligious, exurban-Missouri conservative small-business owner and former envelope salesman¹ who tends to vote Republican.² He cast the unprecedented intrusiveness of Barack Obama’s transition team’s questionnaire for potential administration appointees as evidence that Obama’s “Change we can believe in” slogan was and is bankrupt. I responded with what I had said earlier this year in defending Obama’s rhetoric to a preemptively-disgruntled Clinton supporter: that all political slogans in our particular form of democracy are by necessity ambiguous, and for that very fact are bound to disappoint someone; indeed, to disappoint most someones. Pointing to the emptiness of a political slogan proves nothing. All contemporary political slogans designed to appeal to a national audience are essentialy contentless; they allow us to make them mean whatever we want them to mean. Even slogans once pregnant with specific force in another context—”Sí se puede,” borne of a Chavez hunger strike, adopted by labor unions, and now a rallying cry for protesters against U.S. immigration policy—can be normalized and ambiguated in American political discourse: the phrase is Spanish for “Yes we can,” which is, of course, Barack Obama’s ambiguously affirmative campaign slogan. “Yes we can” is no more or less ambiguous, though, than McCain-Palin’s “Country first,” or any of the other slogans of candidates for contemporary national elections from either major U.S. political party. This should not surprise us; we know that all political slogans must be ambiguous enough to appeal to many.

Obama, speaking on faith in politics, articulates a similar ontology in a 2004 interview given to a Chicago reporter while he was an Illinois State senator running for the U.S. Senate:

Part of the reason I think it’s always difficult for public figures to talk about this is that the nature of politics is that you want to have everybody like you and project the best possible traits onto you. Oftentimes that’s by being as vague as possible, or appealing to the lowest common denominators. The more specific and detailed you are on issues as personal and fundamental as your faith, the more potentially dangerous it is.

Faith and political support come into being through versions of the same process. An adherent to a faith declares himself an adherent to the truths of that faith, just as an adherent to a political cause or candidate declares himself an adherent to the truths of that cause or candidate. That Jesus Christ died for our sins on the cross; that “human rights,” whatever that may mean in context, are “something worth fighting for”; that Barack Obama can be an “agent of positive change”; or, on the sinister side, that the Holocaust did not happen; that homosexuals are inherently evil; that one’s own will is synonymous with the good as such: these are the sorts of truths we commit ourselves to. That they are all inherently ambiguous, are all premised on tiny leaps of faith, is not only necessary but unavoidable—if they are to claim any significant number of adherents. The more precise one becomes in one’s commitment, the more nuanced a picture of belief one provides, the more open to specific denunciations, and thus the more disprovable, that belief becomes. The more a candidate says about his faith, the more he opens himself to faith-based attacks; the more specific a candidate is about his political program, the more specific opportunities reveal themselves for opposing it. Conversely, the more deliberately universalizing a faith or a political prescription is—the more ambiguous its substance and appeal—the more immune to specific attacks it becomes. But only if it remains, as Obama’s prescription has, strenuously and unflinchingly positive.

Obama began his presidential campaign promising not to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and unlike his penultimate and final opponents, each of who made similar promises, he kept his promise. But he did so only by remaining deliberately and productively ambiguous—Sí se puede—and completely commited to the positive charge, the potential productivity, of this ambiguity. He is convicted to the potential to effect transformative change to such an extent that he inspires us to put our faith (whatever that might mean, to whatever degree) in him. All campaigns must project a positive vision³ of the future, even promise that that future will come to be, with full knowledge that there’s absolutely no guarantee that it will indeed come to be. Obama’s campaign merely (but concertedly) did so with a message ambiguous enough to encourage enough of us to inscribe our own beliefs, hopes, and expectations into it, and then claim its success, and the success of the campaign as such, as our own.

Politics and faith are two discourses that operate in this way; sports and love are two others. In all of them, we wager that what is not certain is, and operate based on that certainty, which is thereafter taken for granted as a premise.

Cal fans ecstatic over possession of the Axe

Sports. On Wednesday I received an email from a Stanford Alumni committee whose purpose is to get alums excited about Big Game, Stanford’s annual matchup in football against Cal (UC-Berkeley). Here is the body of the message, in its entirety⁴:

The Axe is ours, and ours it shall stay. Join alums from SF, the Peninsula and beyond as we gear up for the most massive sporting event of the season. For November, we’re focused on Big Game, since the victory celebration continues into Thanksgiving. Once you’ve had your fill of pumpkin pie and turkey, join us in December for more volunteering events, Sports Basement happy hours, and Tahoe trips than you can shake a golden bear at!

Cliff Redeker, ‘05
Cardinal Young Alumni

“The Axe” is a trophy that changes hands each time a particular team wins. Stanford won last year for the first time since the year before my freshman year, and so currently possesses the Axe. Will we win this weekend? Probably not—a friend who knows these things puts the chances at 35-40%. But that doesn’t stop what are essentially campaigners—those who send these morale-raising emails—from stating that we will as a statement of fact: “The Axe is ours, and ours it shall stay.” There is nothing wrong with this; again, it is strictly necessary: this precise sort of claim to certainty where no certainty can possibly exist is the mode of the discourse of fan-support. As we have seen, it is also the mode of the discourses of politics and faith—the mode of any discourse that relies on a claim of truth as its foundation. “Change we might be able to believe in,” and “Maybe we’ll keep they Axe this year” won’t work. This means, yes, that statements like “Change we can believe in” and “We will keep the axe” can be cast as disingenuous to the extent that they project and hold tight certainty where none can exist. But this particular disingenuousness is unavoidable and necessary.

"Sad Dad" (Andy Richter) to New Christine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) on CBS's "The New Adventures of Old Christine": "You're so foxy and nice!"

If Obama fails to deliver “change,” it will be because he fails—not because he was in some way disingenuous in stating it as a goal. If Stanford loses this weekend, that won’t mean that this Cliff Redeker was lying; it’ll mean that he was wrong. Similarly, in romantic love and sexual relations, implicit and explicit commitments to the other party—everything from inducing orgasm to entering into matrimony—are always made with varying degrees of prospective certainty about the inherently uncertain future. Rallying supporters to a political cause, rallying supporters of a team, rallying the adherents of a faith, and rallying oneself to make a romantic commitment all take this form: pretending that we know something (usually about the future [i.e., "We will beat Cal"], but often about the past [i.e., "Christ died for our sins"] or the present [i.e., "The American people want change"]) that we do not and cannot empirically know. In the romantic sphere, as in political sphere, the distinction between lying and failing applies: a divorce due to marital issues does not mean that the parties lied when they said “Till death do us part”; it means that they decided, gradually or suddenly, that fidelity to the truth of their everlasting love has proved unfounded. To paraphrase Gaddis, to stake a claim that something has happened, or will happen—that a truth will either hold or be disproved—is to mortgage a present which is in some way untenable to secure a future that may well not exist.⁵

For my father and many like him, mortgaging the admittedly untenable present is even less tenable than striving to maintain it under bad and worsening circumstances. But for others, like the fictional Christine Campbell (Julia-Louis Dreyfus) on CBS’s The New Adventures of Old Christine, those bad and worsening circumstances serve instead as an indication of the future’s prospectively even more negative ambiguity—a persistently unsettling enough problem make mortgaging the present not only acceptable, but standard practice. Christine brims over with the same positively charged ambiguity Obama exudes. She subscribes to, or wants to think of herself subscribing to, a “Just say yes” philosophy—accepting all reasonable and intriguing romantic opportunities without reservation—as she explains to guest-star love interest Scott Bakula:

She declares love at the drop of a hat, but when that doesn’t work, she immediately and pragmatically changes course:

And she is admirably shameless about pursuing sexual satisfaction:

…even if it means that she eventually end up with Andy Richter’s “Sad Dad,” who woos her with the delightfully direct and impersonal, “Your hair is really pretty. It must take you a long time to make it do that,” and woos her a second time, ostensibly against her will, with “I really like ya. You’re so foxy and nice!” Sad Dad continues: “I even made you this mix tape!” Christine responds, grinning widely: “Awh…you remembered my favorite band is Supertramp….”

Thankfully, Obama is not hapless like Christine—and thankfully, he is also no less approximate, positive, or ardent.

***

1. Think The Office, but less fun and with fewer pretty people and unstaged drama; Dad would probably be Stanley, but with Pam’s soft heart, Jim’s realism, Dwight’s dedication, and probably a little of Kelly’s mild insanity. He is anchored in Stanley chiefly because he would have no tolerance for Michael:

2. With thanks to Amanda Ufheil-Somers, Matt Squeri, and Alain Badiou.

3. Even if that positive vision is “positive” only to a particular constituency; i.e., “Protecting the right to bear arms,” or “Protecting the right to choose,” or working to gradually transform state-bureaucratic organs into the organs of a Christianist theocracy.

4. The body of the email is followed by information about all the functions alluded to within the body of the email.

5. Contextualizing Gaddis:

In that quiet village, stacked three thousand feet above the sea against the southwestern slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama, the province of Madrid, and the kingdom of New Castile laid out barren at its feet, there are thirty-seven bars, where, as in most of that country, the visitor is free to enjoy that privilege which distinguishes him from the natives to such advantage, and get morbidly, or helplessly, riotously, or roaring, drunk. No one minds. He is looked upon as a curiosity, one who has, perhaps, worked out an ingeniously obvious solution to unnecessary problems, and is mortgaging a present which is untenable to secure a future which does not exist.