Critical Exuberance Defined

With a full year under his belt and approval ratings below 50%, many Americans seem disenchanted with President Obama’s leadership. Even former ivory tower advocates for the President, it seems, are criticizing hope and change in action.

“I have to come out as a full participant in Obama mania leading up to the election and, in fact, my niece was employed by Obama and is now employed in his administration,” said Professor Janet R. Jakobsen, continuing,

“so, my exuberance was perhaps uncritical at the time although now here at the end of 2009, after the passage of a health care bill without a public option—oh, but very good benefits for the pharmaceutical and insurance companies—and with more U.S. troops headed to Afghanistan, I think it’s worth taking a moment to remember what we were exuberant about—critically or not—a scant year ago.”

The Barnard College women’s studies professor argued that President Obama’s “Christian realist” foreign policy allows the U.S. to continue “an approach to foreign policy that is simultaneously humble and imperial.” Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism is hegemonic, heteronormative, imperial and conservatively gendered, according to Prof. Jakobsen, who is the Interim Associate Dean of Faculty Diversity at Barnard.

“What Christian realism provides is not a means of changing actions of the U.S. government, of making them less violent, but of changing how the U.S. feels about them,” she said.

“My question today is this: How is it that war so easily became peace?”

Another panelist, New York University Professor Lisa Duggan, characterized the Obama Administration’s economic policies as promoting “neocorporatism,” which features, along with “the continuation of the war and security, economy,”

1. “the emergence of a permanent state role in stabilizing financial capital with taxpayer funds” which “requires an expertise that puts the government into relationship with financial megafirms, that is really the boundary between them is collapsing as the door is swinging faster and faster”; and
2. “the management of social welfare through negotiated settlements without a significant role for collective public interests other than corporate interests, for instance labor unions.”

The panel’s title, “Critical Exuberance” was designed as a response to UC Berkeley’s Judith Butler, who wrote in November 2008 that “if the initial expectation is that [Barack Obama] is and will be ‘redemption’ itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us (or we will find ways to deny or suppress that disappointment in order to keep alive the experience of unity and unambivalent love).”

“Perhaps the only way to avert a ‘crash’—a disappointment of serious proportions that would turn political will against him—will be to take decisive actions within the first two months of his presidency” such as closing Guantanamo and an Iraq exit strategy, she later adds in the article, “Uncritical Exuberance.”

Professor Butler’s predictions, published the day after the election, seem prophetic, at least with regards to this panel arranged by the MLA Division on Gay Studies in Language and Literature.

However, one speaker argued that he wasn’t disillusioned by the Obama administration’s progressive stalling. “Very briefly, I would say I find it very interesting that Obama has already failed according to much of the analysis,” said Marlon Bryan Ross, University of Virginia professor. “For some reason I’m still totally exuberant and I don’t believe it.” He defined the problem as one democracy and convincing the “anti-socialist” masses to “change their minds.”

Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.