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 the term, to be examined in a later chapter. Orthopedagogy is the implementation of this moralism in education, disregarding the student as they are, in expectation that they will conform—and inevitably, this can only be conceived as an inadequate, asymptotic conformity—to the standard of perfection. A moralistic teacher devalues their student’s self-image, except insofar as it corresponds to the teacher’s ideal. So if the students’ ideal differs from that of the teacher’s—as it inevitably does, for example, when the teacher and students have been shaped by different cultural or subcultural contexts—the student cannot see their aims and aspirations reflected in the teacher’s regard. In that situation, students must choose between themselves and the confirmation promised by their teachers, and whichever they choose, they suffer an untenable loss.
Nonconformists reject orthopedagogy because its procedures are indifferent to their singularity. The wisdom of narcissism, its necessity as the basis for the formation of the I, is its irrationally uncompromising defense of the value of singularity, without which the human organism would quickly perish of self-sacrifice or neglect. This is also the wisdom and necessity of the individualist rebellion that defines the tenor of so much American popular culture. Without this rebellious insistence on the singular worth of the self, there can be no revolution, even though there can be no revolution that does not go beyond this individualist rebellion.
In the Freudian notion of ego splitting, externalizing internal contradictions and differences allow one to maintain the whole worth and goodness of the self and the whole worthlessness and evil of the other, obviating and therefore avoiding any inquiry that might challenge such beliefs. This suppression of differences illustrates how intrasubjective narrative strategies can be homologous with intersubjective ones, insofar as it agrees with Hayden White’s cautionary definition of the politicization of interpretation. While for Mitchell the phrase designates the political implications of interpretive practices, for White it designates the application of political power to decide the outcome of “interpretive conflicts.”68 Rather than allowing contradictions to function as the motor of inquiry, driving the resolution of disputes by reasoned debate, such differences are suppressed when “political power or authority is invoked to resolve them.” For those using interpretation as a pretext or rationalization, rather than as part of an inquiry, the exposure of insufficiently convincing reasons is not an educative feature of interpretive conflicts, but a threat to be avoided. White’s definition highlights this distinction between rationalization and reason, pointing to the use of reason as a weapon against authority and power: Because the capacity to reason is distributed democratically as a structural feature of human embodiment, regardless of the disproportionate distribution of power in oppressive systems, the powerful can never completely eliminate the threat posed by reasoned arguments by those they exploit, exclude or demean.
Again, the Trump administration has supplied my argument with a late-breaking illustration of White’s definition. After Trump’s incorrect announcement that Alabama “will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated” by Hurricane Dorian, the National Weather Service in Birmingham corrected the president, assuring that “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian.”69 After media attention to this rebuttal, Trump’s commerce secretary reportedly threatened firings in order to force a rebuke from the Weather Service’s parent agency NOAA, which issued an unsigned statement claiming the Birmingham office’s tweet was “inconsistent with probabilities from the best forecast products available at the time.” Trump then continued to claim vindication, even apparently using a black marker to alter the forecasted path of the hurricane on a weather map he displayed in the Oval Office, and then pretending when asked that he knew nothing about it. While there is a silliness to this blatant demonstration of narcissistic pettiness from the president that makes it all too easy to dismiss, that pettiness itself emphasizes the level at which state power is now being used to deny the most obvious realities and the most rigorously demonstrable facts.
This pattern of avoidance, denial and disavowal has reached heights—or depths, depending on one’s preferred metaphor—from which we can foresee existential threats to the rule of law, the conduct of scientific inquiry and the habitability of regions of the planet. After all, opposition to education in evolutionary biology had long ago politicized scientific consensus, and climate change has now brought us to the point at which the weather is politicized. The Trump administration’s pressure on NOAA staff is an example of trying to decide a dispute about facts by the application of force, here in the form of threats against employees’ careers. COINTELPRO is an example of the application of lethal institutional force to win arguments. And Reagan’s accusation of divisiveness against Carter is an example of rhetorical force deployed to neutralize inquiry. All these illustrate White’s definition of politicization, in which force silences reasoned debate.
Spiro Agnew pioneered the tactic of defining the opposition in the way Reagan did with Carter, famously calling reporters, who dared to expose the truth of Nixon’s secret military adventures and failures
