Inaugurating the Post-Racial State: Official Discursivity and Scene of Narration

" For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus- and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of the Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself.." - President Barack Obama's Inauguration speech

" The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation." - Heidegger The Origin of the Work of Art 

The specific expanse that Heidegger was referencing was the Greek temple, for us the national mall in the capital can be our stand-in. Either way the tone of Heidegger and the scene of President Obama's national imaginings demonstrate a strange alignment both of terms of figure and image. For the figure of post-raciality, a certain unstoppable sense of mobilized historical telos, progress, and unity, and the image- the record crowds under the "shadow of Lincoln" (to paraphrase from Obama's brief statement on Martin Luther King day) accomplish the "fulfillment of our national vocation". Much has been said in the realm of oppositional media (blogs, ethnic media organizations, and even occasionally in the op-ed columns of major newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times) against the official rhetoric of Post-Racial America, and yet such claims of refutation (while urgently necessary) have in some sensed glossed over the importance of Post-raciality's universalizing claims. The questions that cast their ghostly specters over such critical interruptions, can lead us to the skeletal operations now establishing themselves as the new rhetorical agents of a newly inaugurated discursive state apparatus, truth-regime, and social contract. These questions are not: why and for whom is this post-raciality addressed but rather (questions whose answers cannot be other than the maintenance, regulation, and growth of white supremacy and privilege), what such discursive regimes mean as official utterances, as state-sanctioned sovereign speech acts, and morally-juridically-politically coded truths. That is, what do these statements actually say? And where can we find the scenes, spaces/places, and localities from where these speech acts and multiple rhetorics emerge in their sheltered ambivalences? In cultural studies and political philosophy, these scenes have been conceptualized as the "scene of the address" or the "concept of the address" contextualized within specific "histories of determination" that establish and ground the possibility of normalizing political rhetoric. However, the discursive truths of the post-racial state while firmly related to a very specific kind of address: the Right of Reconciliation, the universal telos of racial transcendence at the of racial history, and the national destiny of hope and continuance, are equally and intersectionally a scene of narration (political, aesthetic, ahistorical etc). President Obama's own speeches, personal statements/comments, jokes, and hyper-aestheticized national performances constitute a densely complex of network of address and narration. In speaking to the nation (whose nation? what nation? do his speech acts themselves constitute the narration of a new state (the post-racial state) or do they establish a kind of liminal indeterminateness between a racialized nation and deraced state?), President Obama also performs a kind of radically busy textuality of personhood, nationhood, Empire, and state, one that narrates as it addresses, ruptures as it recuperates, and signifies as it signs an (un)locatable authorship. To clarify, the concepts of address and narration cannot be distinguished by their dialectical opposition and separateness, nor do the two synthesize as a unified totality. We are not working within a binary, but rather, within intensely active circuits of a deeply ambivalent texuality. Further, the notion of a scene should be understood in some sense in its literalness. In the case of President Obama's inauguration speech, both the scene of the address and the narration/address itself signified an ideologically coded production, a violent discursive silence. That President Obama spoke in the national mall built entirely by slave labor, in front of buildings that officially sanctioned legal white supremacy (the Supreme Court, Congress,), where slaves were bought and sold, is just one example of the ways in which specific "histories of determination" and discursive economies of exclusion, were erased or displaced in the moment of national address and narration. Such a displacement is in itself a political narrative that establishes itself along the logical lines of post-raciality's central themes: forgetting or disremembering, gestural politics or performative politics devoid of both agency and power relations, and the centrality of speech acts and rhetoric. The moment of Obama's inaugural address then signified a kind of of politics of displacement and projection- the violent  projection and displacement of so-called "racial tensions" out of the temporality of the present and into the promise of Democracy at the ends of history.